


The Path

by trr_rr



Category: Rhett & Link
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bleak, Blood and Injury, Character Death, Death, Dubious Morality, End of the World, Gun Violence, Illnesses, Implied Cannibalism, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mild Gore, Not A Happy Ending, Post-Apocalypse, Starvation, Stitches, Survival, but a hopeful one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-05-13 12:57:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19251667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trr_rr/pseuds/trr_rr
Summary: The journey south taken by two men after an unnamed catastrophe has struck the world. Rhett and Link travel through the rough terrain of the southeastern United States.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello all.  
> I have been writing this for a while. As with some of my other fics, this story is a re-write of another original story by another author. Rhett recommended The Road by Cormac McCarthy at the end of a podcast a few months back. I have adored that story since I read it and think you should all also watch the movie that is a really spot on adaptation of the original text.  
> I felt this story was a great match for Rhett and Link in fic form because Rhett is endlessly talking about how he'd be the king of the wasteland in an END TIMES™ situation and Link says he would be happily dead and gone. (we'll just see about that)  
> No beta but thank you to dear Ali who read this fic half way through and told me how awful it made her feel and supported me regardless. And thanks to Ethan who drew my two boys looking way cuter than they have any right to.  
> Bryan Fuller calls re-writing other people's work a "remix". I might call it straight plagiarism or down right copying. Either way, here's my 27k Rhinky re-work of The Road.  
> Apologies in advance to Mr McCarthy.

 

 

When he woke in the forest in blackness and the frigid night he'd stretched to touch the man asleep beside his own body. Night's blanket beyond dark and the light of the sunrise more gray than the one that had gone before it. Premature blindness in the eyes of the world's sky fading away the Earth. His fingers lifted and sank gently with every breath. He heaved back the corrugated plastic siding and hauled up in the filthy clothes and blankets and peered away down to the east for signs of light but he found none.

 

He did not know that I had woken and left my eyes closed. How I longed to never let them open on him and his fading faith and hope. But I was that, to him I was always that it seemed now. And why he strives to keep us both living, so we both experience hope and dreaming of what could happen in the next moment.

 

I want to touch him very badly and make him feel part of the fading wonder he sees in me. There is not much on him to touch and the wounds beneath his ragged clothes are sealed with duct tape and I would only hurt him if I tried.

 

It became light enough for binoculars to work and he glassed the vale below. Matter faded away with the murk. The fine soot drifting in loose curls over the backdrop. He measured what he could view. Road segments amidst dead trees. Seeking anything of colour. Any motion. Any remnant of a column of smoke. He dropped the glasses to hang around his neck and pushed down the discoloured cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose and beard on the back of his hand and then glassed the land again. After he just knelt there cradling the binoculars and watching the pale daylight form over the country.

 

Never seeing other people, out in this, is a blessing. I only must see my own suffering and his. If I could take it from him I would choose not to, a selfish wish of mine to never be alone in my suffering.

 

He said that all the crops died a long time ago and there was no more milk or cattle or dogs. I had known that and it had hurt me not to hear bird song or swat at mosquitoes for stealing my blood.

 

I envied all the dead animals for their inability to remember the past. The only thing that is happening is now. You can't prove anything happened back then, to me now. Now is the only reality. Memories no longer exist in the real. All that is real is now and maybe later. But what has passed can never be real again. Real as it might seem to me now, Then is never going to re-happen.

 

We always worry about our shoes.

 

Coming back I was still asleep. He folded our plastic tarp and carried it out to the grocery cart and stuffed it down and came back with our plates and some graham crackers in a ziplock bag and a plastic bottle of syrup. He spread our small cloth we used for meals on the ground and placed everything out and he took the pistol from his belt and tucked it by the plates and then he just sat and watched me sleep. I'd pulled away my mask in the night, my beard becoming stuffy against the cotton, and it was hidden somewhere in the blankets. He watched me and he looked out through the trees toward the road. We were not safe. We could be seen from the road now that it was lighter. I turned in the blankets. I opened my eyes. Hi Rhett, I said.

I'm right here.

I know. My shoulder.

Sore?

 

I nodded and he hunched, a bad liar. His back and his knee were bad always and he wanted to hide it from me. There was no pain killer and no antiseptic. There seemed to be few germs, say for what we carried within our bodies. I had not become infected when I cut myself. A knife wound to Rhett's side did not sour either. We had both been lucky and no more was said about it.

 

Later we walked on the road. We pushed the cart and we both had backpacks. The backpacks were vital. In case we had to leave our cart and make a run for it. Fixed to the handle of the cart was a metal rearview car mirror that we used to watch the road behind us. I shifted the pack higher on my shoulders and watched out over the barren land. The road was empty. Below in the vale the muddy lifeless snake of a river. Unmoving. Stickled dry reeds poked up along the dead shore. Are you okay? Rhett asked me. I nodded. Then we set out along the tarmac in the grizzly daylight, looping through the ash, each the other's world completely.

 

We always worry about our shoes.

 

We left the cart in a ditch hidden with our tarp and we made our way over a slope through thin trees to where we had seen a cliff and we sat beneath the overhang and saw murky rain bluster over the vale. It was so cold. We huddled close wrapped both in a blanket over our coats and after some time the rain halted and the water dripped from dead branches. The weather cleared and we went back to the cart and lifted away the tarp and gathered our blankets and things we needed for the night. We went back into the hills and made our camp in the dry filth under the rocks and Rhett sat with his arms around me trying to keep us warm. Wrapped in the blankets, viewing the black that came to encase us. The dusted shape of the town across the vale vanished in the dark's onset like a ghost and I lit the little lamp and steadied it away from the wind. Then we walked out to the road and he took my hand and we went to the top of the hill where the road rose and where we could see down over the dark country to the south, together there in the wind, wrapped in our blankets, watching for sight of a lamp or a fire. There was nothing. The lamp in the rocks on the side of the hill was little more than a speck of brightness and in a short time we walked back. Everything too wet to make a fire. We ate our poor meal cold and lay down in our bedding with the lamp between us. Can we leave the lamp on till I'm asleep? I said.

Yes, of course we can.

 

I took a long time to go to sleep. After some time I turned and looked at Rhett. His face in the small light flickered with impurities like the mark of high tide from the rain. Can I ask you something? I said.

Yes. Of course.

Are we going to die?

Sometime. Not now.

And we're still going south.

Yes.

So we'll be warm.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay what?

Nothing. Just okay.

Go to sleep.

Okay. I'm going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?

Yes. That's okay.

 

And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something?

Yes, Of course you can.

What would you do if I died?

If you died I would want to die too.

So you could be with me?

Yes. So I could be with you.

Okay.

 

I lay hearing the rain splash in the woods. The freezing and the quiet. The remains of the late world drifting on the dread and temporal gusts here and there in the nothing. Lifted and then dashed and lifted again. Everything unanchored from it's post. Unstable in the soot filled air. Maintained by a gasp, shivering and sudden. If only my heart were stone.

 

His fingernails were blunt and blackened. Purple in places. I remember his yelling when he trapped one between two stone slabs propped up against the wall of a crumbled garage. He had pulled it back to check the space between the wall as we searched and had let the stone from his hand and it had crushed his nail against the wall. He groaned and danced in the half light and held his fingers and blew on them and put one finger in his mouth. We hunkered down and I inspected it despite his grumbling and I had held it in my lap. It bled and he held back his whimpers when I squeezed it to flush out the dirt.

 

We passed through the town at daybreak the next day. We kept the pistol close on the folded tarp across the top of the cart. We kept close to each other's side. The town was burned. No life. Trucks in the street buried under ash, everything covered in ash and dust. Relics in the hardened sludge. A body in a store doorway hardened to leather. Grimacing at the light.

 

Rhett pulled me closer. Just remember that the things you put in your head are there forever, Link, he said.

 

You forget some things, don't you?

 

Yes. Doesn't it seem you forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

 

He flashed before me as a young man again and I saw him cheering and happy scattering ash and filth along with him as he danced off around the corner of something charred and crumpling.

 

There was a river a few miles from our homes. On a hot summer day we had taken friends but that day was our's alone to enjoy with our shirts off and our pants rolled up to the knee. We still got wet but it had been such joy to remove our young sneakers and throw them off on the shore to paddle and splash rainbow arcs into the air and at one another. Treading water we wandered up to the sandy shallows. A perch lolled belly up in the clear water. Yellowing leaves on the surface. We mounted the shoreside to dry our legs and backs again. Heat and health in the light. Greenness. Simple to sit ashore and wave the feet in flowing water. Being together. The slow wander home with shoes in hands. The black glass of the river below us as the little lights of houses came on around us into town. A stereo somewhere. Neither of us had said a word. That was the perfect day of my youth. That, a day to shape all days upon.

 

We kept south in the time to follow. Days into weeks. Quiet and tired. Cold and getting colder. Just up through a fault in the mountains we could see south, where all the land was charred and black, a great gulf with dark rocks and gusts of ash that rose and flattened out along wastes that carried on. The sun moved above us unseen.

 

The front wheel on the cart went wonky. What to do about it? Nothing. When all was ash before us no fires were to be made and the night went far and black and freezing beyond anything we had seen. Cold enough to shatter stone. To take our lives. I held Rhett shivering against me and timed each breath in the dark. I woke to the noise of thunder and sat up. The dim light all about, quaking and dampened by rain and drifting ashes. I pulled the tarp around us and lay awake a long time keeping watch. If we got wet there'd be no fire to dry us. If we got wet we would probably die.

 

The dark I woke to on those nights was blind and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt my ears with listening. I had to get up often. No noise but the breeze in the naked lifeless trees.

 

In the light we went on. Lifeless land. A deer hide fixed to the door of a barn. Inside the building three bodies hanging from the rafters, leathered and dusty in the slats of light. There's probably something here, I said. There could be some corn or something. Let's go, Rhett said. Mostly I worry about our shoes. Shoes and food. Always food. In an old smokehouse we found ham hung up in a high corner. It seemed like something discovered in a tomb, so dry and drawn. Rhett cut into it with his knife. Ruby red and salted meat inside. Rich and good. We fried it that night over our fire, thick slices of it, and simmered it with a tin of beans. Later I woke in the dark and I thought I heard drums beating somewhere low in the vale. Then the breeze shifted and all was quiet.

 

My glasses are always dirty I cannot see without them and I am so afraid that they will get lost or shattered and I will not even be able to see the horizon or his face.

 

His beard is hiding his gaunt features and the sunken cheeks and his eyes are as bugging as ever and dark beneath. My own beard is almost as long as his and I have grey and white streaks there too. My hair has grown to tickle and curl under my ears, mostly catching filthy sweat and grime and salt.

 

Taking off our clothes to bathe in an isolated waterfall. The echo from the cliff comes back and I can see him when he was young and I see him now a skeleton of a boy I knew and I pray to God that he sees less in me than I do in him.

 

Look at the colours. Never thought I'd see a rainbow again. Not in this life. He said.

 

That was the first time I touched him again and we shivered together. Elbows and hip bones and bruises hidden under our blankets against the cliff. My lips were dry and chapped and sore and so he did not kiss me and I was not angry at that fear in him. He did kiss my ear and we were cleaner than we had been in a long time from the freezing waterfall.

Mostly I held his body close to mine and hung on. No idea why I wanted it and why I thought my body could manage it. Minutes passed with us both moving and breathing and it turned out I could not. Rhett did not make me feel shame for it, what more was there for us to feel shame for. I used my hands on him and shoved them down into his heat and I was rough with him to get him to finish. He held me very tightly afterwards. I did it for him, he seemed to need it.

Didn't ever think that would happen. He whispered.

Ever's a long time.

 

I dreamt him into a garden with soft grass and summer light and the sound of birds. His bare limbs warm and spread without care as he slept. His lashes low on his cheeks and a contented curve to his lips. His neck kissed. I had learned to wake myself from such dangerous dreams. A siren's call into nothingness. Often I woke to the taste of peaches in my mouth and then smelled ash and felt the dirty air and saw that it had snowed and gray ice clung to telephone wires above us.

A few nights later further from the vale I woke in the darkness to hear something coming. I lay with my hands at my sides. The floor beneath us trembled. It was coming towards us. It got nearer, grew louder. All trembled. Then it carried on beneath us like a subway train and fled away in the night and disappeared. We pretended not to cling to each other. I buried my head against his chest. Sssh, It's alright.

Another Earthquake?

Yes.

I thought I might be dreaming.

Ever is a long time, but ever is no time at all. We squatted by the road and shoveled rice and beans that had been cooked days ago into our mouths. Already starting to go bad. No safe place to make a fire that would be hidden. We slept huddled close in the disgusting blankets in the black chill. I held Rhett close to me. So thin. My heart, I said. My heart. I knew if I were a good man I could do it as he slept. Rhett was all that stood between me and death.

The year went on. We hardly knew the month. We thought we had enough to eat to pass over the mountains but we had no way of knowing. The easiest pass was five thousand feet and would be unbearably cold. Rhett said everything depended on us reaching the coast, but treading in the night I knew that all of this was empty and hollow. We would die in the mountains and that would be that.

Colder and colder we had campfires all night and let them burn behind us as we went out in the morning. I had wrapped our feet in plastic and tied with rope and the snow was only a few inches deep so far but I knew that if it got much deeper we would have to abandon the cart. It was already hard and we stopped to rest often. I scratched at his beard to comfort him. I was not selfless. It warmed my frigid fingertips to pet at him. Pushing to the edge of the road with Rhett's back to me where he stood bent with his hands on his knees, coughing. He stood with tears in his eyes. On the dirty snow a fine splatter of blood.

How does the Never-To-Be differ from What-Never-Was?

Thin as the air was I thought we could not be far from the summit. Perhaps in the morning. Morning came and went. There was no more snow fall but the snow on our path was seven inches deep and shoving the cart up the slopes was tiring work. I thought we might have to abandon it. What all could we carry? I stood and looked out over the barren grades. Soot landed on the snow to turn it black. Every corner we turned felt like it might hide the pass just ahead. One evening Rhett stopped and looked all around and he recognized it. He unbuttoned the collar of his coat and pushed down the hood and stood listening. The breeze in the dead dark trees. The empty parking lot at the overlook. I stood beside him. Where Rhett had stood once with his own son in a winter long ago.

What is it?

It's the gap. This is it.

We fought on all day down the southern slope of the pass. The cart would not go at all in the deeper snow. We had to drag it behind us with one hand and we broke trail with the other. We might have found something to use as a sled anywhere but up in the mountains. Corrugated sheet metal, an old road sign. The plastic wrap on our feet had somehow soaked through and we were cold and wet all day. Rhett leaned on the cart to catch himself while I waited. There was a sudden crack from up on the slopes. Followed by another. It's trees falling, Rhett said. It's okay. I was looking at the dry trees by the roadside. It's okay, Rhett said, all the trees in the world will fall sooner or later. But not on us. I just know it.

We gathered firewood from the north side of the incline where it was dry. We started a fire and spread out tarp and flattened our clothes on sticks above to let them stink and steam and we sat wrapped in the blankets naked while I held Rhett's feet against my stomach to heat them up.

Soon we came to a pair of tracks cooked into the tarmac of the road. Out of nowhere. We knelt and studied them. Someone had come from the dead forest during the night and trodden on down the melted road. Who could it be? I asked. I don't know. Who is anybody? We came upon him staggering up the road before us, he pulled one leg slightly as he walked and stopped now and then to wait and then set out again. What should we do, Rhett? We're okay, let's just watch.

We followed him a long time but at his speed we lost the day and finally he just sat in the road and did not stand up again. I clung to Rhett's coat. Neither of us spoke. The man was charred as the land around us, his clothes scorched and black. Both his eyes were burnt shut and his hair was a tangled mass of soot blackened onto his skull. As we passed him he turned his head down. As though he had done something wrong. His feet were tied with wire and smothered in road tar and he sat there quiet in his tattered rags I kept looking back. What happened to him?

He's been struck by lightning.

When we reached the bottom of the slope Rhett stopped and looked at me and looked back up the road. The charred man had fallen over and at a distance you could not make out what he was. We have no way to help him, Rhett said. I am sorry for what happened to him but we can't fix it. I hadn't asked Rhett to help him. I had said nothing. We went on and we did not look back again.

Rhett had carried his wallet till it had worn a hole in his pocket. Then one day he knelt by the roadside and brought it out and went through it. Some cash, credit cards. His license. A photo of his wife. He laid everything out on the tarmac. Like playing cards. He pelted the leather fold into the woods and sat with the photograph in his hands. Then he put it down in the road and got up and we went on.

I can't see out of my left eye. He told me.

For how long?

Can't remember. The binoculars still work.

I awoke. I turned on my side and listened. I lifted my head, the pistol was in my hand. I looked down at Rhett and when I looked at the road the first of them was walking into sight. God, I whispered. I reached and woke Rhett, keeping my vision on the road. They shambled through the soot twisting their covered faces back and forth. Most of them wore breathing canister masks. One wore a hazmat suit. Soiled and rank. Loping along with weapons in their grasp, lengths of metal bar, fashioned clubs. They coughed. Then I heard the noise of a truck. Quick, I breathed. I shoved the pistol in my belt and grabbed Rhett by the hand and we pushed the cart past the trees and tipped it where it was harder to see. I pulled Rhett to me. It's alright, I said. We gotta run. Don't turn around. Come on.

I looked around. The truck had hummed along to where we could see it. Men stood in the bed and scouted along the roadside. Rhett tripped and I pulled him up. It's alright, he said. Let's move.

I pulled Rhett down and we stopped under a bank to listen, panting. We heard the engine on the road, it ran on Lord knows what. When I straightened up I could just see the roof of the truck move along the road. Men stood in the bed, holding rifles. The truck went on and the smoke twisted up through the dead forest. The motor puttered and missed. Then it stopped.

I folded down and tucked my fingers on top of my head. God, I said. Silence from the road. I had the pistol in my hand, I didn't remember having took it from my belt. We could hear talking. Heard them unfix and lift the hood. I sat with my arm around Rhett. Sssh, I said. After some time we heard the truck begin to move again. It lumbered like a boat. After a moment it spluttered and stopped again. I raised my head to see and coming through the dry weeds twenty feet from us one of their number was unbuckling his belt. We both froze.

I cocked our pistol and steadied it on the man and the man held with one hand out at his side, the filthy creased paint mask working in and out, insect like. Just keep coming. I looked at the road. Don't look back there. Look at me. If you call to them you're dead. He came forward, holding his belt. The holes in the leather marked his steady emaciation. He walked down into the roadside and he looked at the pistol and he looked at Rhett. Eyes dark and sunken with grime. Like a creature inside bone looking out of the eyeholes. He had a beard that was neat trimmed and had a tattoo of a bird on his neck drawn by a person who clearly could not remember what a bird really looked like. He was skinny. Dressed in rank green overalls and a black baseball cap.

Where are you going?

I was going to take a crap.

Where are you going with the truck.

I don't know.

What do you mean you don't know? Take the mask off.

He pulled the mask off over his head and stood holding it. I mean I don't know, he said.

You don't know where you're going?

No.

What's the truck running on.

Diesel fuel.

How much do you have.

There's three fifty-five gallon drums in the bed.

Do you have ammunition for those guns?

He looked back toward the road.

I told you not to look back there.

Yeah. We got ammunition.

Where did you get it?

Found it.

That's a lie. What are you eating.

Whatever we can find.

Whatever you can find.

Yeah. He looked at Rhett. S’that your man? You won't shoot, he said.

That's what you think.

You ain't got but two shells. Maybe just one. And they'll hear the shot.

Yes they will. But you won't.

How do you figure that? 

It will be in your brain before you can hear it. Do I look like an imbecile to you?

I don't know what you look like.

Why are you looking at him?

I can look where I want to.

No you can't. If you look at him again I'll shoot you.

Rhett sat with both hands on top of his head looking out between his forearms.

I'll bet that you boys is hungry. Why don't you all just come on to the truck? Get something to eat. Ain't no need to be such a hard-ass.

You don't have anything to eat. Let's go.

Go where?

Let's go.

I ain't goin nowheres.

You're not?

No. I aint.

You think I won't kill you but you're wrong. But what I'd rather do is take you up this road a mile or so and then turn you loose. That's all the head start we need. You won't find us. You won't even know which way we went.

You know what I think?

What do you think?

I think you're chickenshit.

He dropped his belt and it fell to the ground. A canteen and a leather sheath for a knife. When I looked up the man held a knife in his hand. He had only stepped twice but he was already between me and Rhett. What do you think you can manage with that? He did not answer. He was big but he was fast. He dove and grabbed Rhett and twisted and roze holding him to his chest with his knife to Rhett's throat. I dropped to the ground and leveled the pistol and fired from a two handed position balanced on both knees at a distance of a few feet. The man dropped back instantly and sprawled with red bubbling from the hole in his forehead. Rhett was lying in his lap without an expression on his face at all. I shoved the pistol in my belt and lifted the knapsack over my shoulder and scooped Rhett under his armpit, turned him around and dragged him off up the roadside at a dead run. Rhett was covered in gore and mute.

We ran. We ran until I saw red blood spots of warning cloud my vision. We ran until Rhett could not take a breath without stifling a howl at the pain in his arthritic knee. Ran until we were sure all was silent and unmoving around us. Until we fell.

We were fortunate enough to stumble upon an icy stagnant pond. I helped him to bend and I used my hand to cup up the water and clean his hair and face. Chunks of meat and blood were smeared into his skin. Tears sprang to his eyes at the frigid touch of the water. I gathered him to me on the bank and wrapped him back up in his coat. I tugged his hood over his head and kissed him deeper than was safe. Deep so that we could hide in our kiss. I could not think of another way to say sorry. I was not sorry.

How’s your leg?

Okay.

Your back?

Okay.

Stop saying okay. I want you to tell me when you’re hurting.

I’m always hurting.

I know. And I want you to tell me.

I’m half blind. I can’t aim anymore. If I get sick I’ll be useless. If I’m useless you should just leave me here. I wouldn’t be mad at you.

Don’t say that. You mustn’t say that. I won’t let anything happen to us. I’ll kill anyone who touches you. 

We hardly slept. Now we had only one bullet in the pistol. Rhett would not need good aim to use it in the way he had told me to. Straight in the mouth, aim up. That’s my worst fear. He had said. That I die and you cannot die too. That someone takes you. You know how they’ll do you. There’s much worse things than death. I just want us to be together.

Upon our return the next day, it seemed the truck men had set up camp on the road itself. There were bones and the remains of a fire. I hunched and held my hand on the tar, it was warm. I stood and looked down the road. I took Rhett with me into the woods. I want you to wait here. I said I won't be far away. I'll be able to hear if you call me. Take me with you, Rhett said. No. I want you to wait here. Please, Link. Stop it. I want you to do what I say. Take the gun. I don't want the gun. I didn't ask you if you wanted it. Take it.

I walked out from the woods to where we had left the cart. It still sat there but it had been raided. The spare things that had not been taken were littered in leaves. I found bones and skin with rocks over them. A pool of guts that made me gag. Dark came and it got very cold and I turned and went out to where Rhett knelt. I put my arms around him and held him close.

As we trod up a slope Rhett turned and studied the far off ruins of a town. Night came down fast. Cold. We put on blankets over our coats.

Hungry. I said.

Come on.

What was that?

I didn't hear anything.

Listen.

I don't hear anything.

We listened. Then, far off in the dark we heard a dog bark. Rhett turned and looked out at the town. It's a dog. He said. A dog? Yes. Where did it come from? I don't know.

I woke in the night and listened. I couldn't remember where I was. That made me smile. Where are we? I said.

What is it, Link?

Nothing. We're okay. Go to sleep.

We're going to be ok.

I know we are.

And nothing bad is going to happen to us.

Because we're together?

Yes. Because we are together.

I sat on steps when I saw something moving at the rear of a house across the road. A face was looking at me. A woman, about our age, bundled in a large coat. I stood. She ran across the road and up the drive. I followed. No one there. I looked at the house and then ran to the end of the yard through the dry grass to a putrid creek. Come back, I called. I won't hurt you. I was stood crying when Rhett came sprinting across the road and took me by the arm. What are you doing? He hissed. What are you doing.

There's a woman, Rhett.

There's no woman. What are you doing?

Yes there is, I saw her.

I told you to stay put, didn't I tell you? Now we've got to go. Come on.

I just wanted to see her.

Rhett took me by the arm and dragged me back up the yard. I could not stop crying and looking back.

Come on, Rhett said. We've got to go.

I want to see her.

There's no one to see. Do you want to die? Is that what you want?

I don't care, I said, sobbing. I don't care.

Rhett stopped and held me. I'm sorry, He said. Don't say that. You mustn't say that.

Rhett had put a scattering of dried raisins in a cloth in his pocket and at midday we sat in the dead grass by the roadside and ate them. I looked at him. That's all there is, isn't it? I said.

Yes.

Are we going to die now?

No.

What are we going to do?

We're going to drink some water. Then we're going to keep going down the road.

Okay.

I woke in the dark forest in the dirt shivering violently. Rhett sat up and felt about for me. He held his hand to my thin ribs. Warmth and movement. My heartbeat.

Three more days. Then four. We were starving. The land was looted, ravaged, turned inside out and robbed of every crumb. The dark was deathly cold and casket black and the mornings had a terrible silence to them. Like the quiet before a battle. Rhett's wax pale skin was all but translucent.

We struggled through the street of a town like drunk men in stinking blankets. I held the pistol at hip height and held Rhett's hand in the other. At the edge of town we stumbled on a lonely house in a field and we crossed and entered it and wandered through the space. We came upon ourselves in a mirror and I almost raised the pistol. It's us, Link, Rhett whispered. It's us.

We went out to the back porch. I need to sit down. Rhett said. Okay. You can sit down.

I crossed the dry stubby grass still holding the gun. It was kind of a shed. Dirty floor. Wooden shelves with cheap colourful flower pots. Everything smothered in soot. There were spades and shovels that stood in the corner. A mower. A bench beneath the window and next to that a cabinet. I opened the cabinet. Old seed packets. Begonia. Morning glory. I stuck them in my pocket. For what? I heard Rhett cough from the steps.

I crossed the grass again and felt dizzy and had to stop. I guessed that it was from the musty air of the shed. Rhett was watching me. How many days does it take to die? Ten? Not so many more than that I guessed. I couldn't think. Why had I stopped? I turned and let my eyes level on the grass. I trod back. I tested the ground with my aching feet. I stopped and turned once more. I returned to the shed and brought out a spade and in the spot I had tested I launched the blade into the ground. It sank halfway and stopped with a hollow wooden sound. I started to shovel away the dirt.

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

It was slow going. God I was tired. I leaned on the spade. I lifted my head and looked at Rhett. He was sat as before, weak and watching me. I had to stop between shovels of dirt. What I uncovered was a piece of particle board covered in roof felt. I shoveled out along the edges. It was a hatch six by three feet. At one end there was a hasp with a padlock taped up in a plastic bag. I gasped and rested, clinging to the handle of the spade. My forehead in the crook of my arm. When I looked up once more Rhett was standing in the yard a few feet away from me.

 

I wedged the edge of the spade beneath the wood and pried it up and then knelt and grabbed hold of the lock and twisted the whole thing loose and chucked it into the grass. I wedged the spade under the door and got my fingers under it and then I stood and hefted it up. Soil went rattling down on the boards. I looked at Rhett. Are you all right? Rhett nodded mutely. 

 

I flung the door up and let it fall in the grass. Simple stairs made out of two by fours lead down into the darkness. I started to descend the stairs but then turned and stretched up to kiss Rhett's cheek.

 

Concrete walled the bunker. The floor was kitchen tiled with concrete beneath. Two iron cots with bare springs sat against either wall. The mattress pads were rolled up at the foot of each one, military style. I turned and looked up to Rhett, crouched above me blinking in the little light emanating from my zippo lighter.

Oh my God, I whispered. Come down. Oh my God. Come down.

 

Box upon box of tinned food. Peaches, apricots, beans. Canned meat. Corned beef. Hundreds of gallons of water in ten gallon plastic jugs. Paper towels, toilet paper, paper plates. Clean, dry blankets stuffed in trash bags. I held my forehead in my hand. Oh my God, I said. I looked back at Rhett. It's all right. Come down.

What did you find?

Wait till you see.

I led him down the stairs. Can you see? I said. Can you see?

 

There was no headroom for him to stand. I ducked under a lantern with a green metal shade that hung from a hook. I held Rhett's hand and we went along the row of labeled containers. Corn, chili, soup, stew, spaghetti sauce. The luxuries of a dead world.

Is this real?

Oh yes. It's real.

 

I pulled one of the boxes down and tore it open and held up a can of peaches.

It's here because someone thought they might need it.

But they didn't get to use it.

No, they didn’t.

They died.

Yes.

 

Is it okay for us to take it? Yes. It is. They would want us to. Just like we would want them to.

 

We found knives and plastic utensils and cutlery in a plastic box. A good can opener. There were electric torches that did not work. A box of batteries, mostly corroded and leaking an acid goo but some looked fine. I eventually got one of the lanterns to work and I set it on the table. I looked at Rhett. What would you like for dinner?

Pears. He said.

Good choice. Pears it is.

 

I took out paper plates from the stack and set them on the table. We unrolled mattress mats on the cots to sit on and opened the carton of pears and I took out a can and set it on the table and worked it open as I turned the wheel of the can opener. Rhett sat silent on the bunk, wrapped in the blanket, watching I realized Rhett had not fully committed himself to any of this. We could wake any time in the black damp woods. These are going to be the best pears we've ever tasted, I said. The best. Just you wait.

We sat side by side on Rhett's cot and ate the pears. Then we ate a can of peaches. We licked the forks and angled the bowls and drank sickly sweet syrup. We looked at each other. One more. I don't want to get sick. We won't get sick. We haven't eaten in a long time. I know. Okay.

 

When I woke again the lamp overhead was buzzing. I did not know where I was. I was lying with my coat over me. I sat and looked to Rhett asleep on the other bed. I had taken off my shoes but I did not remember that either and I got them from under my cot and shoved them on and climbed the stairs and yanked the hasp and pushed the hatch door and peered out. Early morning. I looked at the little house and looked at the road and I was going to lower the hatch again when I halted. The milky gray light was in the west. We had slept the whole night and the day that had followed. I lowered the hatch and secured the hasp again and went back down and sat on the bunk. I viewed the supplies. I had been ready to die and now I wasn't going to and I had to think about that. Anyone could come upon the hatch in the yard and they would know what it was. I had to think about what could be done. We were not hidden in the woods. This was far and away from hidden. I rose and went to the table and fixed up the two burner gas stove and got out a frying pan and a kettle and the box of kitchen utensils.

 

What woke Rhett was me grinding coffee in the hand grinder. He sat up and blinked around. He covered one eye with his hand and then the other. Link? He said. Hi. Are you hungry? I have to go to the bathroom. I have to pee. I pointed the spatula up at the hatch door. Rhett went past, his hair was matted with sweat. What are you making? He said. Coffee. Ham. Biscuits.

Wow. Rhett said.

 

I dragged the footlocker across the floor between the beds and draped it with a towel and put out the plates and cups and plastic forks. I set down a bowl of biscuits covered with a hand towel and a plate of butter and a can of condensed milk. Salt and pepper. I looked at Rhett. He looked drugged. I brought the frying pan from the stove and dished out a piece of browned off ham onto Rhett's plate and served scrambled eggs from the other pan and poured out spoonfuls of baked beans and poured coffee into our cups. Rhett looked up to me. Go ahead, I said. Don't let it get cold.

What do I eat first?

Whatever you like.

Coffee?

Yes. Are you all right?

I don't know.

Do you feel okay?

Yes.

What is it?

Do you think we should thank the people?

The people?

The people who gave this to us.

Well. Yes, I guess we should do that.

Will you do it?

Why don't you?

I'm not good at it.

Yes you are. You know how to say grace just as well as I do.

Rhett sat staring at his plate. He seemed lost. I was about to speak when he said:

Dear people, thank you for all this food and the blankets. We know that you saved all this for yourselves and your family and if you were here we wouldn't eat it no matter how hungry we were and we're sorry that you didn't get to eat it and we hope that you're safe in heaven with God.

 

He wouldn't stay alone in the bunker. He followed me across the lawn while I hauled plastic jugs of water to the bathroom at the back of the house. We took the stove with us and a few pans and we heated water and poured it in the tub and poured in water from the jugs. It took longer than I wanted to get it good and warm. When the tub was almost full Rhett got undressed and stepped in shivering and sat. Fragile and filthy and naked. Holding his shoulders. The only light coming from the ring of the blue crown in the burner of the stove. What do you think? I said.

Warm at last.

 

I washed his matted hair and scrubbed him with soap and a sponge. He drained the grime he sat in and splashed fresh warm water over him from the pan and I wrapped him shivering in a towel and wrapped him also in a blanket. I combed out his hair and looked at him. Steam came off his skin like smoke. Are you okay? I said.

My feet are cold.

You'll have to wait for me.

Hurry.

I bathed and then climbed out and tipped detergent into the bath water and pushed our stinking jeans down into the wet with a toilet plunger. We brushed our teeth. 

Are you ready? I said.

Yes.

 

I turned down the stove until it spluttered and went dead and then I flicked on the flashlight and laid it on the floor. We sat on the edge of the bath and tugged our shoes on and then I handed Rhett the pans and soap and I took the stove and the little bottle of gas and the pistol and wrapped in our blankets we went back across the yard to the bunker.

 

We sat on the cot, wearing new sweaters and socks and bundled in new blankets. We drank Coca Cola out of plastic mugs and after some time I went back into the house and wrung the water out of the jeans and brought them back and hung them up to dry.

How long can we stay here, Link?

Not long.

How long is that?

I don't know.

Maybe one more day. Two.

Rhett coughed. Then he said: Because it's dangerous.

Yes.

Do you think they'll find us?

No. They won't find us.

 

Later, when Rhett was asleep I went up to the house and dragged furniture onto the lawn. I pulled out a mattress and balanced it on the hatch and from inside I pulled it up over the plywood and slowly lowered the door so the mattress completely covered it. It wasn't much of a subterfuge but it was better than nothing at all.

 

I eased down the lamp until it puttered out and kissed Rhett's clean hair and crawled into my cot under the clean sheets and gazed one more time at my man trembling in the orange heater light and then I fell asleep.

 

I wish we could live here.

I know.

We could be on the lookout.

We are on the lookout.

What if some good guys came?

Well, I don't think we're likely to meet any good guys on the road.

We're on the road.

I know.

If you're on the lookout all the time does that mean that you're scared all the time?

Well. I suppose you have to be scared enough to be on the lookout in the first place. To be careful. 

But the rest of the time you're not scared?

The rest of the time.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Maybe you should always be on the lookout. If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.

Do you always expect it, Rhett?

I do. But sometimes I might forget to be on the lookout.

 

I sat Rhett on the footlocker under the lamp with a comb and a pair of scissors and set about cutting the knots from his hair. I also trimmed his beard. I tried to make a good job of it and took my time. When I was done I took the towel from around his shoulder and held up a mirror for him to see.

You did a good job, Link. 

Good.

I look so skinny.

You are so skinny.

 

I cut my own hair but it didn't go so well. I trimmed my beard with the scissors and shaved my face with a pan of heated water and a safety razor. Rhett watched. When I was done I looked in the mirror. I turned to Rhett.

How do I look?

Rhett cocked his head.

 

We ate an extravagant meal by candlelight. Green beans and ham and mashed potatoes and biscuits and gravy. I found a bottle of bonded whiskey in a paper bag and we drank a little of it in glasses with water. It made me dizzy before I finished it. We drank no more. We ate peaches and cream over biscuits for dessert and drank coffee. We dumped the paper plates in a trash bag. We played cards.

 

I took his hand. The purple bruise on his finger had worked its way up in the striations of his nail. I was sure he would lose it but it remained intact. I turned out the light in our concrete sanctum and brought myself close to him. Either it was a moment of hibernation or an awakening from one. With one kiss all ash became black lilies floating on dark currents up in what remained of the world.

 

We had nothing to be going with for what I wanted to give him but we settled against the cot together. I was glad for having turned out the light. Not for my own vanity but I did not want to make love with a man who had to see that he was thrusting against a man who would be bruised from it. I wanted him and he wanted me and that was that.

 

Who would have known a saintly trance could still survive. In spite of all we had given up we were imbued with miraculous breath and possessed of sensitivity. It was not a gasping all embracing beauty like I had wanted but it was enough. Enough for us both this time. I found my end with him and he almost laughed at my weak groan of relief. I felt a silent shake in his rib cage several times as I lay against his chest. I told myself it was laughter. That he was laughing.

 

In the night I was awakened by the patter of rain on the mattress over the door above us. Then Rhett held his hand to my shoulder. Did you hear that? He said.

No. What?

A dog.

A dog? Up above us?

Yes. And if there is a dog, there are people.

 

By dark the rain had stopped and we opened the hatch and started to carry supplies across the damp yard. We loaded up an old cart that we had found in the car port. When the cart was full of all that we could push I tied a tarp over it and fastened it with bungee cord. We stood back and looked at it with the flashlight. We should have saved the old car mirror from the other cart.

 

We ate well and slept till dawn and washed with sponges and washed our hair in the basin in cold water. We ate breakfast and in no time we were back on the road. We wore fresh face masks cut from sheets. I went ahead with a broom and cleared the way of dead bracken and burned branches and Rhett bent over the handle of the cart and watched the road.

 

It was too hard to push the cart in the soggy woods and we stopped in the middle of the road and made steaming tea and ate the last of the canned beef with cracker bread and mustard. Sitting back to back we watched the road. Do you know where we are, Link? Rhett said.

Sort of.

How sort of?

Well. I think we must be about two hundred miles from the coast. As the crow flies.

So it won't be long?

We're not going as the crow flies.

Because crows don't have to follow roads.

Yes.

They can go wherever they want.

Yes.

Do you think there might be crows, or any type of bird somewhere?

I don't know.

But what do you think?

I think it's unlikely.

 

Later in the day as we rounded a curve in the road Rhett stopped and put his hand on the cart. Link, he whispered. I looked up. A small shape distant on the road, hunched and shuffling. Rhett stood leaning heavily on the cart. What should we do? I asked.

It could be a decoy.

What are we going to do?

Let's just follow. We'll see if he turns around.

 

The traveler did not look back to us. We followed behind him for some time and then we overtook him. An elderly man, short and bent. He carried an old army rucksack with a blanket bundle across the top of it and he tapped along the floor with a de-barked stick for a cane. When he saw us he moved to the edge of the road and stood wary. He had a dirty towel tied around his jaw as if he suffered a toothache and even by our standard of living he smelled disgusting.

I don't have anything, he said. You can look if you want.

We're not robbers.

He leaned one ear forward. What? He called.

I said we're not robbers.

What are you?

We had no way to answer. He wiped his nose with the back of his wrist and stood waiting. He had no shoes and his feet were bound with cardboard and tattered cloth. He seemed to fold into himself. He leaned on his cane and lowered himself onto the road where he stayed among the soot with a hand over his forehead. He seemed like a pile of rags that had fallen from a cart. We came forward. Sir? I said. Sir? I squatted and put a hand on his shoulder. He's scared, Rhett.

 

Rhett looked up and down the road. If this was an ambush he goes first, he said.

He's just scared, Rhett. Tell him we won't hurt him. The old man shook his head, his fingers tangled in matted hair. I looked up at Rhett. Maybe he thinks we're not real.

What does he think we are?

I don't know.

We can't stay here. We have to go.

He's scared, Rhett.

I don't think you should touch him.

Maybe we could give him some food.

Rhett stood watching off down the road. Damn, he whispered. He looked down at the old man. Perhaps he'll turn into a god and us two both into trees. All right, he said.

 

I untied the tarp and folded it over and pulled out a tin of fruit cocktail. I took up the can opener and opened it. I pushed back the lid and shuffled over and knelt.

Oh, what about a spoon?

He's not getting a spoon, Link.

 

I handed the tin to the old man. Take it, I whispered. Here. The old man raised his gaze and looked at me. I gestured at him with the food. I felt like someone trying to feed a dying bird broken in the road.

It's okay, I said. The old man lowered his hand from his head. He blinked. Cloudy eyes buried in the papery ash creases of his skin.

Take it, I said.

 

He reached with crooked claws and held the tin to his chest.

Eat it, I said. It's good.

I made tipping motions with my hands.

The old man looked into the tin. He took a fresh hold and held it to his nose. His long fingers scrabbled at the metal. Then he angled it and drank. The syrup ran down his crusty beard. He lowered the can, chewing with difficulty. He jolted his head when he swallowed.

Look, Rhett, I whispered.

I see, Rhett said.

I turned to look at him.

I know what the question is, Rhett said. The answer is no.

What's the question?

Can we keep him. We can't.

I know.

You know.

Yeah.

All right.

Can we give him something else?

Let's see how he does with this first.

 

We watched him eat. When he was finished he sat with the empty tin like more fruit might appear. What do you want to give him? Rhett said.

We could cook something on the stove. He could eat with us.

You're talking about stopping.

For the night. Yeah.

 

Rhett looked down at the old man and he looked out at the road.

All right. He said. But then tomorrow we go on.

I didn't answer.

That’s the best deal you're going to get. Okay.

Okay.

Okay means okay. It doesn't mean we negotiate another deal tomorrow. There's no other deal. This is it. Okay?

Okay.

 

We helped the elderly man find his feet and handed him his cane. He weighed less than a hundred pounds. He stood looking around. Rhett took the tin from him and slung it into the charcoaled woods. The old man tried to hand Rhett his came but he pushed it away.  When was your last meal? I asked him.

I don't know.

You don't remember?

I ate just now.

Do you want to eat with us?

I don't know.

You don't know?

Eat what?

Maybe some beef stew. With crackers. And coffee.

What do I have to do?

Tell us where the world went.

What?

You don't have to do anything. Can you walk okay?

I can walk. He looked at me.

Are you a young man? He said.

I looked at Rhett.

What does he look like? Rhett said.

I don't know. I can't see good.

Can you see me?

I can tell someone's there.

Good. We need to get going. Rhett looked at me. Don't hold his hand. Let's go.

Where are we going? The old man said.

We're going to eat.

He nodded and reached out with his cane and tapped at the road.

How old are you?

I'm ninety.

No you're not.

Okay.

Is that what you tell people?

What people?

Any people.

I guess so.

So they won't hurt you?

Yes.

Does that work?

No.

What's in your pack?

Nothing. You can look.

I know I can look. What's in there?

Nothing. Just some stuff. Nothing to eat.

No.

What's your name?

Ely.

Ely what?

What's wrong with Ely?

Nothing. Let's go.

 

We camped out in the woods much closer to the road than was safe. We had to pull the cart across blackened thicket and we built a fire for the old man to warm himself by and Rhett didn't much like that. We ate and the old man sat wrapped in his quilt and clutched his spoon like a child. We had only two mugs and he sipped his coffee from the bowl he had eaten from, his claws hooked over the rim. Sitting like a hungry and ragged deity, staring into the coals. You can't go with us, you know. Rhett said.

He nodded.

How long have you been on the road? I asked.

I was always on the road. You can't stay in one place.

How do you live?

I just keep going. I knew this was coming.

You knew it was coming?

Yeah. This or something like this. I always believed in it.

Did you try to get ready for it? Rhett asked.

No. What would you do? 

I don't know. People were always getting ready for tomorrow.

I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.

I guess not.

Even if you knew what to do you wouldn't know what to do. You wouldn't know if you wanted to do it or not. Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?

Do you wish you would die? I asked him.

No. But I might wish I had died. When you're alive you've always got that ahead of you. 

Or you might wish you'd never been born. 

Well. Beggars can't be choosers.

You think that would be asking too much.

What’s done is done. Anyway, it's foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these. 

I guess so.

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave. He lifted his head and looked across the fire at Me. Then he looked at Rhett. I could see his small eyes watching him in the firelight. Lord knows what those eyes saw. Rhett got up to pile more wood on the fire and he raked the coals back from the dead leaves. The red sparks rose in a shudder and died in the dark above us. The old man slurped the last of his coffee and set down the bowl before him and leaned toward the fire with his fingers splayed out. Rhett watched him. How would you know if you're the last man on earth? He said.

I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it. 

Nobody would know it. 

It wouldn't make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.

I guess God would know it. Is that it?

There is no God.

No?

There is no God and we are his prophets.

I don't understand how you're still alive. How do you eat?

I don't know.

You don't know?

People give you things.

People give you things.

Yes.

To eat.

To eat. Yes.

No they don't.

You did.

No I didn't. Link did.

There's other people on the road. You're not the only ones.

Are you the only one?

The old man peered warily. What do you mean? He said.

Are there people with you?

What people?

Any people.

There's not any people. What are you talking about?

I'm talking about you. About what line of work you might be in.

The old man didn't answer.

I suppose you want to go with us. Rhett said.

Go with you.

Yes.

You won't take me with you. 

You don't want to go.

I wouldn't have even come this far but I was hungry.

The people that gave you food. Where are they?

There's not any people. I just made that up.

What else did you make up?

I'm just on the road the same as you. No different.

Is your name really Ely?

No.

You don't want to say your name.

I don't want to say it.

Why?

I couldn't trust you with it. To do something with it. I don't want anybody talking about me. To say where I was or what I said when I was there. I mean, you could talk about me maybe. But nobody could say that it was me. I could be anybody. I think in times like these the less said the better. If something had happened and we were survivors and we met on the road then we'd have something to talk about. But we're not. So we don't.

Maybe not.

You just don't want to say in front of your man. 

You're not a shill for a pack of roadagents? Rhett said.

I'm not anything. I'll leave if you want me to. I can find the road. 

You don't have to leave.

I've not seen a fire in a long time, that's all. I live like a creature. You don't want to know the things I've eaten. When I saw you both I thought that I had died. 

You thought we were angels?

I didn't know what you were. I never thought I’d see a smiling face again. I didn't know that would happen.

What If I said we were Gods?

The old man shook his head. I'm past all that now. Have been for years. Where men can't live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone. So I hope that's not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing. I hope it's not true. Things will be better when everybody's gone. 

They will? I asked.

Sure they will.

Better for who?

Everybody.

Everybody.

Sure. We'll all be better off. We'll breathe easier.

That's good to know.

Yes it is. When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He'll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He'll say: Where did everybody go? And that's how it will be. What's wrong with that?

 

In the morning we stood in the road and Rhett and I argued about what to give the old man. In the end he didn't get much. Some tins of vegetables. Finally I just went over to the edge of the road and sat in the ashes. The old man tucked the tins into his backpack and fastened the straps. You should thank him you know, Rhett said. I wouldn't have given you anything.

Maybe I should and maybe I shouldn't. 

Why wouldn't you?

I wouldn't have given him mine.

You don't care if it hurts his feelings?

Will it hurt his feelings?

No. That's not why he did it.

Why did he do it?

Rhett looked over at me and he looked at the old man.

You wouldn't understand. He said. I'm not sure I do.

Maybe he believes in God.

I don't know what he believes in.

He'll get over it.

No he won't.

The old man didn't answer. He looked around at the day.

You won't wish us luck either will you? Rhett said.

I don't know what that would mean. What luck would look like. Who would know such a thing.

 

Then all went on. When I looked back the old man had set out his cane, tapping his way, dwindling slowly on the road behind us like some storybook peddler from an ancient time, dark and bent and spider thin and soon to vanish forever. Rhett never looked back at all.

 

In the afternoon we spread our tarp on the road and sat and ate a cold lunch. Rhett watched me. Are you talking? He said.

Yes.

But you're not happy.

I'm okay.

When we're out of food you'll have more time to think about it.

I didn't answer. We ate. After a while I said: I know. But I won't remember it the way you do.

Probably not. I didn't say you were wrong.

Even if you thought it.

It's okay.

Yeah, I said.

Well. There's not a lot of good news on the road. In times like these.

You shouldn't make fun of him.

Okay.

He's going to die.

I know.

Can we go now?

Yeah, Rhett said. We can go.

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

In the night Rhett woke in the frozen black coughing and he coughed till his chest sounded raw. He leaned to the fire and blew on the coals and he put more wood on and rose and wandered away from the camp as far as the light allowed. He knelt in the dry dirt and soot with a blanket draped around his shoulders and after a while the coughing stopped. I thought about the old man out there somewhere. Rhett looked back at the camp through the dark dead trees. He did not know I had woken. He knelt wheezing softly, his hands on his thighs. He was whispering but I could not make out what he had said.

 

The day following we walked on till dark. We could find no safe place to make a fire. When Rhett lifted the tank from the cart he said that he thought it felt light. He sat and turned the valve but the valve was already on. He turned the little knob on the burner. Nothing. He leaned and listened. He tried both valves again in their combinations. The tank was empty.

 

He squatted there with his fingers folded into fists against his forehead, he closed his eyes. The tank was empty. After awhile he raised his face and just sat staring out at the black woods. We ate a cold supper of cornbread and beans and franks from a tin. I asked him how the tank had gone empty so soon but he said that it just had.

You said it would last for weeks.

I know.

But it's just been a few days.

I was wrong.

 

We ate in silence. After a while I said: I forgot to turn off the valve, didn't I?

It's not your fault. I should have checked.

I set my plate down on the tarp. I looked away.

It's not your fault. You have to turn off both valves. The threads were supposed to be sealed with Teflon tape or it would leak and I didn't do it. It's my fault. I didn't tell you.

There wasn't any tape though, was there?

It's not your fault.

 

The soft black ash danced through the streets like ink unfurling across the seafloor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the soot that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded world went trundling past the sun.

 

Long before we reached the coast our stores were all but gone. The country was stripped and plundered long ago and we found nothing in the buildings by the roadside. I found a telephone directory in a gas station and wrote the name of the town on our map in pencil. We sat on the curb in front of the building and ate crackers and looked for the town but we couldn't find it. I sorted through the sections and looked again. Finally I showed Rhett. We were some fifty miles west of where I'd thought. I drew a stick figure on the map. This is us, I said.

Rhett traced the route to the sea with his finger.

How long will it take to get there, you think?

Two weeks. Three.

Will it still be blue?

The sea? I don't know.

Rhett nodded. He sat looking at the map. Come on, he said. We should go.

 

In the late afternoon it rained. We left the road and walked a dirt trail through a field and spent a night in a shed. The shed had a concrete floor and at the far end stood some empty steel barrels. Rhett blocked the doors with the drums and built a fire in the floor and he made a bed out of some flattened cardboard boxes. The rain drummed all night on the roof. When I woke the fire had burned out and it was very cold. I was sitting up wrapped in my blanket.

What is it?

Nothing. I had a bad dream.

What did you dream about?

Nothing.

Are you okay?

No.

He put his arms around me and held me. It's okay, he said.

I was crying. But you didn't wake up.

I'm sorry. I was just so tired.

I meant in the dream.

 

In the morning I shifted my hips on the hard concrete and looked out through the boards at the gray country. Rhett was still sleeping. Water dripped in puddles in the floor. Small bubbles appeared and skated and vanished again. In a town not far away we had slept together in a place like this and listened to the rain. There was an old fashioned drugstore there with a black marble counter and rusted chrome stools with cracked plastic seats. The pharmacy was looted but the store itself was strangely intact. Pricey electronic equipment sat undisturbed on the shelves. We stood looking the place over. Sundries. Notions. What are these? Rhett took my hand and led me out but I had already seen it. A man's head beneath a cakebell at the end of the counter. Decomposing. Wearing a baseball cap. Dried eyes turned sadly downward. Did I dream this? I did not. I rose and knelt and blew at the coals and dragged up the burned board ends and got the fire going.

 

There are other good guys. You said so.

Yes,

So where are they?

They're hiding.

Who are they hiding from?

From each other.

Are there lots of them?

Don't know.

But some.

Some. Yes.

Is that true?

Yes. That's true.

But it might not be true.

I think it's true.

Okay.

You don't believe me.

I believe you.

Okay.

I always believe you.

I don't think so.

Yes I do. I have to.

 

We moved on. We lay in a field until dark watching the road but no one came. It was very cold. When the going was too dark to see we got the cart and stumbled back to the road and got the blankets and wrapped them around ourselves and went on. Feeling the pavement out under our feet. One wheel on the cart began to squeak but there was nothing to be done about it. We struggled on for some hours and then wandered off through the burned roadside brush and lay shivering and exhausted on the cold ground and slept till day.

When we woke Rhett was sick.

 

He had come down with a fever and we lay in the woods like fugitives. Nowhere to make a fire. Nowhere safe. I sat in the leaves watching him. His eyes brimming. Are you okay, Rhett? I said. Are you dying?

No. I'm just sick.

I'm really scared.

I know. It's alright. I'm going to get better. You'll see.

 

Three days. Four. I slept poorly. The racking cough woke me. Rasping suck of air. I'm sorry, Rhett said into the merciless dark. It's okay, I replied.

 

One night Rhett woke from a dream and would not tell me what it was. You don't have to tell me, I said. It's all right.

I'm scared.

It's all right.

No it's not.

It's just a dream.

I'm really scared.

I know.

Rhett turned away. I held him.

Listen to me, I said.

What.

When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up. I won't let you.

 

When we set out again Rhett was very weak and for all his speeches he'd become more faint of heart than he had been in years. Filthy with vomit, leaning on the bar handle of the shopping cart. He looked at me out of his sunken haggard eyes. Some new distance between us. I could feel it. In two days time we came upon a country where firestorms had passed through leaving miles and miles of burn. Thicker ash in the roadway inches deep and hard going with the cart. The road beneath us had buckled in the heat and then set back again. Rhett leaned on the handle and looked down the straight. The thin trees fallen. The waterways a filthy sludge. A blackened land.

 

After the crossroads in the wilderness we began to come across the belongings of travelers abandoned in the road years before. Bags and boxes. Everything charred and black. Old suitcases malformed and bubbled from the heat. Here and there the imprint of things pulled from the tar by scavengers. A mile beyond and we began to come upon the dead. Figures half sunk in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths gasping. Rhett put his hand on my shoulder. Take my hand, he said. I don't think we should look at this.

What you put in your head stays there forever.

Yes.

It's okay, Rhett.

It's okay?

They're already there.

I don't want to look.

They'll still be there.

Rhett stopped and looked down the road and he looked at me.

Why don't we just go on, I said.

Yes. Okay.

They were trying to get away, weren't they.

Yes. They were.

Why didn't they leave the road?

They couldn't. Everything was on fire.

 

We passed through, picking our way through the mummified wreckage. Rhett was coughing every step of it. He saw me watching him. He was what I thought about.

 

We slumped in the road and ate leftover skillet bread hard as biscuit and our last can of tuna. Rhett opened a can of prunes and we passed it between us. I held the tin up and drained the last of the juice and then sat with the tin in my lap and passed my finger around inside it and put my finger in my mouth.

Don't cut your finger, Rhett said.

You always say that.

I know.

Rhett watched me lick the lid of the tin with great care.

Stop watching me, I said.

Okay.

I folded down the lid of the can and set it in the road before me. What? I said. What is it?

Nothing.

Tell me.

I think there's someone following us.

That's what I thought.

That's what you thought?

Yes.

That's what I thought you were going to say.

What do you want to do?

I don't know.

What do you think?

Let's just go.

We should hide our trash.

Because they'll think we have lots of food.

Yes.

And they'll kill us.

They won't kill us.

They might try to.

We're okay.

Okay.

I think we should lay in the weeds for them. See who they are. And how many.

And how many.

Yes.

Okay.

If we can get across the creek we could go up on the bluffs there and watch the road.

Okay.

We'll find a place.

We rose and piled our blankets in the cart.

Get the tin, Rhett said.

 

It was late into the twilight before the road crossed the creek. We trundled over the bridge and shoved the cart out through the woods looking for some place to leave it where it would not be seen. We stood looking back at the road in the dusk. What if we put it under the bridge? I said.

What if they go down there for water?

How far back do you think they are?

I don't know. It's getting dark.

I know.

What if they go by in the dark?

Let's just find a place where we can watch. It's not too dark yet.

 

We hid the cart and went up on the slope among the rocks with our blankets and we dug ourselves in where we could see back down the road through the trees for about half a mile. We were safe from the wind and we wrapped ourselves up in our blankets and took turns watching but after a while Rhett was asleep. I was almost asleep myself when I saw a figure appear at the top of the road and stand there. Soon two more appeared. Then a fourth. They stood and grouped. Then they came on. I could just make them out in the deep dusk. I thought they might stop soon and I wished we had found a place further from the road. If they stopped at the bridge it would be a long cold night. They came down the road and crossed the bridge. Three men and a woman. The woman walked with a waddling gait and as she approached I could see that she was pregnant. The men carried packs on their back and the woman carried a small cloth suitcase. All them of them wretched looking beyond description. Their breath steaming softly. They crossed the bridge and continued on down the road and vanished one by one into the waiting darkness.

 

The land turned from pine to oak and pine. Magnolias. Trees as dead as any. I picked up one of the heavy leaves and crushed it in my hand to powder and let the powder sift through my fingers.

 

On the road early the next day. We had not traveled far when Rhett pulled at my sleeve and we stopped and stood. A thin stem of smoke was rising out of the wood ahead. We stood watching. What should we do, Rhett?

Maybe we should take a look.

Let's just keep going.

What if they're going the same way we are?

So? I said.

We're going to have them behind us. I'd like to know who it is.

What if it's an army?

It's just a small fire.

Why don't we wait?

We can't wait. We're almost out of food. We have to keep going.

 

We left the cart in the woods and checked the rotation of rounds in our cylinder. We stood listening. The smoke stood in a column in the still air. There were no noises of any kind. The leaves were soft from the recent rains and silent underfoot. Rhett turned and looked at me. His dirty face wide with fear. We circled the fire at a distance, I held on to Rhett's hand. He crouched and put his arm around me and we listened for a long time. I think they've gone, he whispered.

What?

I think they're gone. They probably had a lookout.

It could be a trap, Rhett.

Okay. Let's wait awhile.

 

We waited. I could see the smoke through the broken trees. A breeze had begun to disturb the top of the spire and the smoke moved and we could smell it. We could smell something cooking. Let's circle around, Rhett said.

Can I hold your hand?

Yes. Of course you can.

 

The woods were just burned and crumbling trunks. There was nothing to see. I think they saw us, Rhett said. I think they saw us and ran away. They saw we had a gun.

They left their food cooking.

Yes. Let's take a look.

It's really scary, Rhett.

There's no one here. It's okay.

 

We walked into the little clearing, I was clutching Rhett's hand. They had taken everything with them except whatever black thing was skewered over the coals. Rhett was standing there checking the perimeter when I turned and buried my face against him. He looked quickly to see what had happened. What is it? He said. What is it? I shook my head. Oh, Rhett. I said. He turned and looked again. What I had seen were the charred limbs of an infant blackening on the spit. Rhett bent and pressed me against his body and started for the road, holding me close. I'm sorry, he whispered. I'm sorry.

 

I didn't know if I'd ever speak again. We camped at a river and I sat by the fire listening to the water running in the black. It wasn't a safe place because the noise of the river masked any other but Rhett thought it would cheer me up. We ate the last of our provisions and Rhett studied the map. He measured the road with a piece of twine and looked at it and measured it again. Still a long way to the coast. I didn't know what we'd find when we got there. Rhett shuffled the sections together and put them back in the plastic bag and sat staring into the coals.

The following day we crossed the river by a narrow iron bridge and entered an old mill town. Odd things scattered by the roadside. Electrical goods, ornaments. Power tools. Things forgotten long ago by pilgrims on their way to their collective deaths. Even a year ago Link might sometimes pick something up and carry it with him for a while but he didn't do that anymore.

We sat and rested and drank the last of our good water and left the plastic jug to stand by the road. I said: If we had that little baby it could go with us.

Yes. It could.

Where did they find it?

Rhett didn't answer.

Could there be another one somewhere?

I don't know. It's possible.

I'm sorry for what I said about those people.

What people?

Those people that got burned up. That were stuck in the road and got burned.

I don't think you said anything bad.

It wasn't bad. Can we go now?

Okay. Do you want to hold my hand while I push the cart?

It's okay.

Why don't you lean on the handle with me for a while.

I don't want to. It's okay.

Slow water in the flat country. The sloughs by the roadside motionless and gray. Ahead in the road was a dip and a stand of cane. I think there's a bridge there, I said.

Probably a creek. 

Can we drink the water? 

We don't have a choice. 

It won't make us sick. 

I don't think so. It could be dry.

The water was little more than a seep. I could see it moving where it drew down into the concrete under the roadway and Rhett spat into the water and watched to see if it would move. He got a cloth from the cart and a plastic jar and came back and wrapped the cloth over the mouth of the jar and sank it in the water and watched it fill. He raised it up and held it to the light. It didn't look too dirty. He pulled the cloth away and handed the jar to me. Go ahead, he said. I drank and handed it back.

Drink some more.

You drink some, Rhett.

Okay.

We sat there filtering the ash from the water and drinking until we were full. I lay back in the stubble grass.

We need to go.

I'm really tired.

I know.

Rhett sat watching me. We had not eaten in two days. In two more we would begin to get weak. Rhett went back to check the road. Black dark and trackless where it crossed the open country. The winds swept ash from the surface. Rich lands at one time. No sign of life to be found. It was no country that we knew. The names of towns or the rivers. Come on, he said. We have to go.

We slept more and more. More than once I woke to find us both sprawled in the road like traffic victims. The sleep of death. I sat up reaching about for the pistol. In the leaden evening Rhett stood leaning with his elbows on the cart handle and looking across the fields at a house perhaps a mile away. It was me who had seen it. Shifting in and out of the curtain of whirling ash like a house in some uncertain dream. Rhett leaned on the cart and looked at me. It would cost us some effort to get there. Take out blankets. Hide the cart somewhere along the road. We could reach it before dark but we could not get back. We have to take a look. We have no choice.

I don't want to.

We haven't eaten in days.

I'm not hungry.

No, you're starving.

I don't want to go there, Rhett.

There's no one there. I promise.

How do you know?

I just know.

They could be there.

No they're not. It will be okay.

Setting out across the fields we were wrapped in our blankets, carrying only the pistol and a bottle of water. The field had been ploughed a last time and there were stalks of choppy stick poking up from the ground. The pattern of the tractors blade was still visible in the soil. It had rained recently and the earth was soft underfoot and Rhett kept his eyes on the ground and before long he stopped and picked up an arrowhead. He spat on it and wiped it on the seam of his pants. He gave it to me. It was white quartz, perfect as the day it was made. There are more, he said. Watch the ground, you'll see. He found two more. Gray flint. He stopped several times and I did not wait for him as he dug into old ideas. He started to call to me where I had trudged ahead and then he looked about at the gray country and the gray sky and he dropped whatever he had found and hurried on to catch up. 

We stood in front of the house staring at it. There was a gravel drive. A brick loggia. Double stairs that swept up. At the rear of the house a brick dependency that may once have been a kitchen. Beyond that a log cabin. Rhett started up the stairs but I pulled at his sleeve. Can we wait a while?

Okay. But it's getting dark.

I know.

Okay.

We sat on the steps and looked out over the country. There's no one here, Rhett said.

Okay.

Are you still scared?

Yes.

We're okay.

Okay.

 

We went on up the stairs to the brick floor porch. The door was painted black and it was propped open with a cinderblock. Dried leaves and weeds blown behind it. I clutched at Rhett's hand. Why is the door open, Rhett?

It just it. It's probably been open for years. Maybe the last people propped it open to carry their things out.

Maybe we should wait till tomorrow.

Come on. We'll take a quick look. Before it gets too dark. If we secure the area then maybe we can have a fire.

But we won't stay in the house will we?

We don't have to stay in the house.

Okay.

Let's have a drink of water.

Okay.

Rhett took the bottle from the side pocket of his parka and screwed off the top and watched me drink. Then he took a drink himself and put the lid back on and took my hand and we entered the darkening hallway. Tall ceilings. A chandelier. On the landing was a high palladian window and the faintest shape of it headlong on the stairwell wall in the day's last light. We don't have to go upstairs, do we? I whispered.

No. Maybe tomorrow. 

After we secure the area.

Yes.

Okay.

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

 

In the drawing room the shape of a rug beneath the dusty soot. Furniture draped in sheeting. Pale squares on the wallpaper where paintings once hung. In the room on the other side of the foyer stood a grand piano. We entered and stood listening. We wandered through the rooms like doubting house buyers. We stood looking out through the tall windows at the darkening land.

 

In the kitchen was cutlery and cooking pots and English china. A pantry where the door closed softly behind us. Tile floor and rows and shelves and on the shelves several dozen quart jars. Rhett crossed the room and picked one up and blew the soot from it. Green beans. Slices of red and green pepper standing among the ordered rows. Tomatoes. Corn. New potatoes. Okra. I watched him. Rhett wiped the dust from the caps of the jars and shoved at the lids with his thumb. It was getting dark fast. He carried a pair of the jars to the window and held them up and turned them. He looked at me. There may be poison, he said. We'll have to cook everything really well. Is that going to be okay?

I don't know.

I think if we cook them really good they'll be all right.

Okay.

Why do you think nobody has eaten them?

I think nobody found them. You can't see the house from the road.

We saw it.

You saw it.

I studied the jars.

What do you think? Rhett said.

I think we've got no choice.

I think you're right.

Let's get some wood before it gets any darker.

 

We carried armloads of broken limbs up the backstairs through the kitchen and into the dining room and snapped them to length and stuffed the fireplace full. Rhett lit a fire and smoke curled up over the wooden lintel and rose to the ceiling and folded down again. He fanned the blaze with a magazine and soon the flue began to draw and the fire roared in the room lighting up the walls and the ceiling and the glass chandelier. The flames lit the dark glass of the window where I stood. I was stunned by the head. Rhett pulled the sheets off the long dining table in the center of the room and shook them out and made a nest for us in front of the hearth. He sat me down and pulled off my shoes and pulled off the dirty rags with which my feet were wrapped. Everything's okay, he whispered against my neck. Everything's okay.

 

Rhett found candles in the kitchen drawer and lit two of them and then melted wax onto the counter and stood them in the wax. He went outside and brought in more wood and piled it beside the hearth. I had not moved. There were pots and pans in the kitchen and he wiped one out and stood it on the counter and then he tried to open one of the jars but he could not. He carried a jar of green beans and one of potatoes to the front door and by the light of a candle he knelt and placed the first jar sideways in the space between the door and the jamb and pulled the door against it. Then he squatted with a groan on the foyer floor and hooked his foot over the outside edge of the door and pulled it against the lid and twisted the jar in his hands. He took a fresh grip on the glass and pulled the door tighter and tried again. The lid slipped in the wood, then held. He turned the jar slowly in his hands, then took it from the jamb and turned off the ring of the lid and set it on the floor. Then he opened the second jar and rose and carried them back into the kitchen, holding the candle in his other hand. He tried to push the lids up off the jars with his thumbs but they were too tight. I thought that was a good sign. He set the edge of the lid on the counter and punched the top of the jar with his fist and the lid snapped off and fell on the floor and he raised the jar and sniffed at it. It smells good, he said. He poured the potatoes and the beans into a pot and carried the pot into the dining room and set it in the fire.

 

We ate slowly from bone china bowls, sitting at opposite sides of the table with a single candle between us. The pistol lying to hand like another dining implement. The warming house creaked and groaned. Like a thing being called out of long hibernation. Rhett nodded over his bowl and his spoon clattered to the floor. He shook awake and rose and came around and pulled me to the hearth and put me down in the sheets and covered me with the blankets. He must have gone back to the table because I woke in the night to see him lying there with his face in his crossed arms. It was cold in the room and outside the wind was blowing. The windows shook in their frames. The candle had burned out and the fire was down to coals. Rhett rose and built back the fire and sat beside me and pulled the blankets over me and brushed back my filthy hair. I think maybe they are watching, he said in the flickering heat. I was halfway to sleep when I heard him whisper again: They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back.

 

I didn't want Rhett to go upstairs. Rhett tried to reason with me. There could be blankets up there, he said. We need to take a look.

I don't want you to go up there. 

There's no one here.

There could be.

There's no one here. Don't you think they'd have come down by now?

Maybe they're scared.

I'll tell them we won't hurt them.

Maybe they're dead.

Then they won't mind if we take a few things. Look, whatever's up there it's better to know about it than not.

Why?

Why. Well, because I don't like surprises. Surprises are scary. And we don't like to be scared. And there could be things up there we need. We have to take a look.

Okay.

Okay? Just like that?

Well. You're not going to listen to me. 

I have been listening to you.

Not very hard.

There's no one here. There has been no one here for years. There's no tracks in the ash. Nothing disturbed. No furniture burned in the fireplace. There's food here.

Tracks don't stay in the ash. The wind blows them away.

I'm going up.

 

Four days we stayed in the house eating and sleeping. Rhett found more blankets upstairs and we dragged in great piles of wood and stacked the wood in the corner of the room to stay dry. I found an antique bucksaw of wood and wire that we used to saw the dead trees to length. The teeth were rusted and dull and I sat in front of the fire with a rattail file and tried to sharpen them but to little purpose. There was a creek some hundred yards from the house and I hauled endless pails of water across the stubble fields and the mud and we heated water and bathed in a tub off the back bedroom on the lower floor and I cut our hair and shaved off my beard. We had clothes and blankets and pillows from the upstairs rooms and we fitted ourselves out in new attire. I made a nesting place in front of the hearth, turning over a chest to use as a headboard for our bed and to hold the heat. All the while it rained. Rhett set up pails under the downspouts at the corners of the house to catch fresh water off the old metal roof and at night I could hear the rain drumming in the upper rooms and dripping through the house.

 

We sorted through the outbuildings for anything to use. We found a wheelbarrow and pulled it out and tipped it over and turned the wheel slowly, inspecting the tire. The rubber was glazed and cracked but I thought it might hold air and I looked through old boxes and a mess of tools and found a bike pump and screwed the end of the hose to the valve of the tire and started to pump. Air leaked out of the rim but I turned the wheel and had Rhett hold down the tire until it caught and I got it pumped up. I unscrewed the hose and turned the wheelbarrow over and walked it across the floor and back. Then I pushed it outside for the rain to clean.

 

When we left two days later the weather had cleared up and we set out down the muddy road pushing the wheelbarrow with our new blankets and the jars of canned food wrapped in our extra clothes. Rhett had found a pair of work shoes and I was wearing blue tennis shoes with rags stuffed into the toes and we had fresh sheeting for face masks. When we got to the road we had to turn back to fetch the cart but it was less than a mile. I walked alongside Rhett with one hand on the wheelbarrow. We did a good job, Rhett.

Yes we did.

 

We stood in a grocery store in a small town where a deer head was mounted on the wall. I stood looking at it a long time. There was broken glass all over the floor and Rhett made me wait at the door while he kicked through the trash in his work shoes but he found nothing. There were two gas pumps outside and we sat on the concrete curb and lowered a small tin can on a string into the underground tank and hauled it up and poured the cupful of gasoline it held into a plastic jug and lowered it again. We had tied a small length of pipe to the can to sink it and we crouched over the tank like apes fishing with sticks in an anthill for an hour until the jug was filled. Then we screwed the top on the jug and set it in the bottom rack of the cart and went on.

 

Long days. Open land with the soot blowing over the road. I sat by the fire at night with pieces of the map across my knees. I had all the names of towns and rivers by heart and I measured their progress daily.

 

We ate more sparingly. We had almost nothing left. I stood in the road holding the map. We listened but we could hear nothing. Still I could see open country to the east and the air was different. Then we came upon it from a turn in the road and we stopped and stood with the salt breeze blowing in our hair where we had lowered our hoods to listen. Out there was the gray beach with the slow waves rolling dull and the distant sound of it. Like the ruin of some alien sea breaking on the shore of a world unknown. Out on the tide lay a tanker half turned over. Beyond that the ocean vast and freezing and shifting heavy like a slow heaving vat of molten metal and then the gray foam line of ash. Rhett looked at me. He could see the disappointment in my face. Sorry it's not blue, I said. That’s okay, he replied.

 

Not an hour later we were sitting on the beach staring out at the wall of thick dirty fog across the horizon. We sat with our heels dug into the sand and watched the dull sea wash up at our feet. Cold. Desolate. Birdless. We had left the cart in the bracken beyond the dunes and taken blankets with us and sat wrapped in the wind-shade of a great driftwood log. We sat together for a long time. Rhett held me close. Further down the bleached ribcages of what may have been cattle. Gray salt grime on the rocks. The breeze blew and dry seed pods danced down the sands and stopped and went on again.

 

Do you think there might be ships out there? I said.

I don't think so. They wouldn't be able to see very far.

No. They wouldn't. What's on the other side?

Nothing.

There must be something.

Maybe there's two men and they're sitting on the beach.

That would be okay.

Yes. That would be okay.

Would they be good guys too?

They could be.

Yes. But we don't know.

We don't know.

So we have to be vigilant.

We have to be vigilant. Yes.

How long can we stay here?

I don't know. We don't have much to eat.

I know.

You like it here.

Yeah.

Me too.

Can I go swimming?

Swimming?

Yes.

You'll freeze your ass off.

I know,

I will be really cold. Worse than you think.

That's okay.

I don't want to have to come in after you.

You don't think I should go.

You can go.

But you don't think I should.

No. I think you should.

Really?

Yes. Really.

Okay.

 

I rose and let the blanket fall to the sand and stripped out of my coat and out of my shoes and clothes. I put my glasses down by the fire. I stood naked, clutching myself and dancing. Then I went running down the beach. So white. Knobby spine bones. My shoulder blades moving under my pale skin. Running naked and leaping and screaming into the slow roll of the surf. By the time I came out I was blue with cold and my teeth were chattering. Rhett walked down to meet me and wrapped me shuddering in the blanket and held me until I stopped gasping. I found myself crying. What is it? Rhett said.

Nothing.

No, tell me.

Nothing. It's nothing.

 

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

 

 

With the night we built a fire against the log and ate plates of okra and beans and the last of the canned potatoes. The fruit was long gone. We drank tea and sat by the fire and slept in the sand and listened to the roll of the water in the bay. I got up in the dark and walked out and stood on the beach wrapped in my blankets. Too black to see. Taste of salt on my lips. Waiting. Then the slow boom falling downshore. The seething hiss of it washing over the beach and pulling away again. I thought there could be ghost ships out there still, drifting with their rags for sails. Or life in the deep. Great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness.

 

When I returned Rhett was awake and he was scared. He had been calling to me but not loud enough that I could hear him. I put my arms around him. I couldn't hear you, I said. I couldn't hear you over the surf. I put wood on the fire and fanned it to life and lay there in the blankets with him watching the fire twist in the breeze and then we slept.

 

Come daylight we trekked out along the crescent beach. We leapt to the firmer sand. We stood, our clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. A line of woven weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see.

 

From the end of the spit to the boat there was perhaps a hundred feet of open water. We stood looking at the boat. Some seventy feet long, stripped to the deck, keeling over in ten or twelve feet of water. I turned and studied the beach and the dunes. Then I handed Rhett the pistol and sat in the sand and began to unlace my shoes. What are you doing, Link?

I'm going to take a look.

I wanna come with you.

No. I want you to stay here.

I want to go with you.

You have to stand guard.

Will I be able to see you?

Yes. I'll keep checking back on you. To make sure everything's okay.

I want to go with you.

I stopped. You can't, I said. Our clothes would blow away. Somebody has to take care of things. 

 

I folded everything into a pile and placed my glasses atop. God it was cold. I stretched and kissed Rhett's cheek. Stop worrying, I said. Just keep a lookout. I waded naked into the water and stood and splashed myself wet. Then I trudged out and dove headlong.

 

I swam the length of the steel hull and turned, treading water, gasping with the cold. I got hold of a rail and pulled aboard. Turned and crouched on a slant of wood decking shivering. A few lengths of cable snapped off at the turnbuckles. Shredded holes in the wood where hardware had been torn out. Some terrible force to drag the decks of everything. I waved at Rhett but he didn't wave back.

 

The cabin sat low with portholes along one side. I crouched and wiped away the salt and looked in but I could see nothing. I tried the teak door but it was locked. I gave it a shove with my bony shoulder. I looked around for something to pry with. I was shivering uncontrollably and my teeth chattered. I thought about kicking the door with the flat of my foot but then I thought that was not a good idea. I held my elbow in my hand and banged into the door again. I felt it give. Only just. I kept at it. The jamb split on the inside and finally gave and I pushed it open and stepped down into the cabin.

 

A sour smell. Moist and clammy. I thought the boat had been looted but it was the sea that had done it. Locker doors hanging open into the room and all the metalwork dull green. I went through the forward cabins. Past the galley. Flour and coffee on the floor and canned goods half crushed and rusting. A head with a stainless steel toilet and sink. Gear scattered everywhere.

 

I was half expecting some horror but there was none. The mattresses in the cabins had been slung on the floor and bedding and clothing were piled against a wall. Everything was wet. A door stood open to the locker in the bow but it was too black to see inside. I ducked my head and stepped in and felt about. Sea gear piled on the floor. I began to drag everything out and pile it on the tiled bed. Foul weather gear, blankets. I came up with a damp sweater and pulled it over my head. I also found a pair of yellow rubber sea boots. A nylon jacket I zipped myself into and pulled on the stiff yellow pants. I thumbed the suspenders up over my shoulders and pulled on the boots. Then I went back up on deck. Rhett was sitting as I had left him, watching the ship. He stood up in alarm and I realized that in my new clothes I made an uncertain figure. It's me, I called, but Rhett only stood there and I waved to him and went below again.

 

I found a rubber canvas sea bag and searched the rest of the ship in my boots, pushing myself off the bulkheads against the tilt, the yellow pants rattling in the cold. I filled the bag with items of clothing. A pair of shoes I thought might fit Rhett. A folding knife with a wooden handle. A pair of sunglasses. Still there was something lethargic in my searching. Like exhausting the least likely places first when looking for something lost. Finally I went to the galley. I turned on the stove and turned it off again.

 

In a locker behind the wheel pedestal I found nylon rope and a steel bottle of gas and a fiberglass toolbox. I sat on the floor of the cockpit and sorted through the tools. Rusty but in working order. Pliers, screwdrivers, wrenches. I latched the toolbox shut and stood and looked for Rhett but he was not there. A moment of panic before I saw him walking along the beach downshore with the pistol hanging in his hand, his head down. Standing there I felt the ship lift and slide. Just slightly. Tide coming in. Slapping at the rocks of the jetty down below. I turned and went back into the cabin.

  
  


I gathered everything and stacked it against the table. There were plastic jugs of water in the locker off the galley but they were empty save for one. I picked up one of the empties and saw that it had cracked and the water had leaked and I guessed the jugs had frozen at some point in the ship's aimless journey. Probably several times over. I took the half full jug and stood it on the table. I unscrewed it and sniffed. Then I raised the jug and drank. Then I drank again.

 

The canned food on the galley floor did not look salvable and there were some that were rusty and some that were ominously bulging. All cans had been stripped of their labels and the contents written on the metal in marker pen in Spanish. Not all of which I knew, had burst free of their labels. I sorted through them, squeezing them and shaking them. I stacked them on the counter above the small refrigerator. I thought there must be crates of food packed somewhere in the hold but I didn't think any of it would be edible. In any case there was a limit to what I could pack into the cart. It occurred to me that I took this windfall in a fashion close to matter of fact but still I said what I had said before. That good luck might be no such thing. There were few nights lying in the dark beside Rhett that I did not envy the dead.

 

When I had carried it all out into the saloon I stacked it against the companionway and went back into the galley and opened the toolbox and set about removing one of the burners from the gimballed stove. I disconnected the braided gas line and removed the metal spiders from the burners and put one of them in my coat pocket. I unfastened the brass fittings with a wrench and wiggled the burners loose. Then I uncoupled them and attached the hose to the coupling pipe and fixed the other end of the hose to the gas bottle and carried it out to the saloon. Lastly I made a bindle of a plastic tarp of some cans of juice and cans of fruit and vegetables. I tied it with a cord and then I stripped out of my clothes and piled them with the goods I had collected and went up onto the deck naked and slipped down to the railing with the tarp and flung over the side and dropped into the gray and freezing water.

 

I waded ashore in the last light and swung the tarp down the swiped the water off my arms and chest and went to get my clothes. Rhett followed me back. He kept asking about my shoulder, blue and discolored from where I had slammed it against the hatch door. It's all right, I said. It doesn't hurt. We got lots of stuff. Wait till you see.   
  


We rushed down the beach against the light. What if the boat washes away? Rhett said.

It won't wash away.

It could.

No it won't. Come on. Are you hungry?

Yeah.

We're going to eat well tonight. But we need to get a move on.

I'm hurrying, Link.

And it might rain.

Oh, you can smell it too?

Yes. Wet ashes. Come on.

 

Then I stopped. Where's the pistol?

Rhett froze. He looked scared.

Christ, I said. I looked back up the beach. We were already out of sight of the boat. I looked at Rhett. He had put his hands on top of his head and he was close to tears. I'm sorry, he said. I'm really sorry.

I set down the tarp with the canned goods. We have to go back.

I'm sorry, Link.

It's okay. It will still be there.

Rhett stood with his shoulders slumped. He sniffed and wiped his nose. I put my arms around him. It's all right, I said. You're so tired. It's all right. I'm the one who's supposed to make sure we have the pistol and I didn't do it. I forgot.

I'm sorry, Link.

Come on. We're okay. Everything's okay.

 

The gun was where Rhett had dropped it in the sand. I picked it up and shook it and I sat down and pulled and cylinder. I rolled the cylinder out into Rhett's hand and blew through the barrel and the frame to clear it. I refitted the parts and cocked the pistol and lowered the hammer and cocked it again. I alighted the cylinder for the one cartridge to come up and I let the hammer down and put the pistol in my parka and stood up. We're okay, I said. Come on.

 

The dark caught us. By the time we reached the headland path it was too black to see anything. We stood in the breeze from the sea with the dead grass hissing. Rhett held onto my hand. We just have to keep going, I said. Come on.

I can't see.

I know. We'll just take it one step at a time.

Okay.

Don't let go.

Okay.

No matter what.

No matter what.

 

We went on in perfect darkness, visionless as the blind. I held out one hand before me although there was nothing but sand to collide with. The sea pounded more distant but I took my bearings by the wind as well as after staggering on for the better part of an hour until we emerged from the grass and stood again on the dry sand of the upper beach. The wind was even colder. I had brought Rhett around on the lee side of me when suddenly the entire beach before us appeared shuddering out of the blackness and vanished again.

Rhett jerked in fright. It's lightning, come on, I said.

I slung the tarp up over my shoulder and took Rhett's hand and we went on, tramping up the sand like dressage horses against tripping over some piece of wood or debris. The strange gray light broke over the beach again. Far away a faint rumble of thunder muffled in the murk. I think I saw out tracks, I said. So we're going the right way.

I'm really cold, Link.

I know. Pray for lightning.

 

We went on. When the light broke over us I saw that Rhett was bent over and was whispering to himself. I looked for our tracks going up the beach but I could not see them. The wind picked up even more and I was waiting for the first spits of rain. If we got caught out on the beach in a storm in the night we would be in trouble. We turned out faces away from the wind, holding on to the hoods of our parkas. The sand rattled against our legs and raced away in the black and the thunder cracking just offshore. The rain came in at a slant and stung our faces and I pulled Rhett against me.

 

We stood in the downpour. How far had we come? I waited for the lightning but it was dying off and when the next crack came and then the next I knew that the storm had taken out our tracks. We trudged on through the sand at the upper edge of the beach, hoping to see the shape of the log where we had camped. Soon the lightning was gone. Then in a shift in the wind we heard a distant pitter patter. We stopped. Listen, I said.

What is it?

Listen.

I don't hear anything.

Come on.

What is it, Link?

It's the tarp. It's the rain falling on the tarp.

 

We came upon the tarp almost at once and knelt and dropped the bindle and groped about for the rocks we had weighed the plastic with and pushed them beneath it. I raised the tarp and pulled it over us and then used the rocks to hold down the edges inside. I got Rhett out of his wet coat and pulled the blankets over us, the rain pelted us through the plastic. I shucked off my own coat and held Rhett close and soon we were asleep.

 

In the night the rain stopped and I woke listening. The heavy thud of the shore after the wind had died. In the first dim light I rose and walked down the beach. The storm had littered the shore and I walked the tideline looking for anything of use. In the shallows beyond the breakwater an ancient corpse rising and falling among the driftwood. I wished I could hide it from Rhett but he was right. What was there to hide? When I got back Rhett was awake sitting in the sand watching me. He was wrapped in the blankets and he'd spread our wet coats over the dead weeds to dry. I walked up and eased myself down beside him. I nuzzled a kiss under his chin and we sat watching the sea lift and fall beyond the shore.

 

Most mornings we were offloading the ship. I kept the fire going and I’d wade ashore naked and shivering and drop the rope and stand in the warmth of the blaze while Rhett towed in the seabag through the swells and dragged it onto the beach. We emptied out the bag and spread our blankets and clothing out on the warm sand to dry before the fire. There was more on the boat than we could carry and I thought we might stay a few days on the beach and eat as much as we could but it was dangerous. We slept that night in the sand with the fire keeping off the cold and our goods scattered all about us. Rhett woke coughing and rose and took a drink of water and dragged more wood onto the fire, whole logs of it that shook up great cascades of sparks. The salty wood burned orange and blue in the fire's heart and he sat watching it a long time. Later he walked up the beach, his long shadow reaching over the sand before him, sawing about with the wind and fire. Coughing. Coughing. He bent over and I thought about life but there was no life to think about and after a while he walked back. He got a can of pears from the bag and opened it and sat before the fire and ate slowly with a spoon while he thought I was still asleep. The fire breathed in the wind and sparks raced down the sand. He sat the empty can at his feet.

 

In the morning I built a fire and walked on the beach while Rhett slept. I was not gone long before I felt a strange unease and when I got back Rhett was standing on the beach wrapped in his blankets waiting for me. I hurried my steps. By the time I got to him he was sitting down. What is it? I said. What is it?

I don't feel good, Link.

I palmed Rhett's forehead. He was burning. I half carried him to the fire.

It's okay. I said. You're going to be okay.

I think I'm going to be sick.

It's okay.

I sat with him in the sand and held his forehead while he bent and vomited. I wiped Rhett's mouth with my hand.

I'm sorry, Rhett said.

Shh. You didn't do anything wrong.

 

I covered him with blankets. I tried to get him to drink some water. I put more wood on the fire and knelt with my hand on Rhett's forehead. You'll be alright I said. I was terrified.

Don't go away, Rhett said.

Of course I won't go away.

Even for just a little while.

No. I'm right here.

Okay. Okay, Link.

 

I held him close all night, I dozed and woke in terror feeling for Rhett's heart. In the morning he was no better. I tried to get him to drink some juice but he would not. I pressed my hand to his forehead, summoning a coolness that would not come. I wiped his white mouth while he slept. I will do what I promised, I whispered. No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone.

 

I went through the first aid kit from the boat but there was nothing of much use. Aspirin. Bandages and disinfectant. Some antibiotics but they had run their shelf life. Still that was all we had and I helped Rhett drink and put one of the tablets on his tongue. He was soaked in sweat. I had already stripped him out of the blankets and now I unzipped him out of his coat and then out of his clothes and moved him away from the fire. Rhett looked up at me. I'm so cold, he said.

I know. But you have a really high temperature and we have to get you cooled off.

Can I have another blanket?

Yes. Of course.

You won't go away?

No. I won't go away.

 

I carried Rhett’s clothes into the sea and washed them, I stood shivering in the cold salt water naked from the waist down and sloshed them up and down and rinsed them out. I spread them by the fire on sticks angled into the sand and piled on more wood and went and sat by him again, smoothing his matted hair. In the evening I opened a can of soup and sat it in the coals and I ate and watched the darkness come up. When I woke I was lying shivering in the sand and the fire had died almost to cinders and it was black night. I sat up wildly and reached for Rhett. Yes, I whispered. Yes.

 

I rekindled the fire and I got a cloth and wet it and put it over Rhett’s forehead. The cold dawn was coming and when it was light enough to see I went into the woods beyond the dunes and came back dragging a great gathering of dead limbs and branches and set about breaking them up and stacking them near the fire. I crushed aspirin in a cup and dissolved them in water and put in some sugar and sat and lifted Rhett’s head and held the cup while he drank.

 

I walked the beach. I could hear Rhett coughing. I stood looking out at the dark swells. I was staggering with fatigue. I went back and sat by Rhett and refolded the cloth and wiped his face and then spread the cloth over his forehead. You have to stay near, I said. You have to be quick. So you can be with him. Hold him close. Last day of the earth.

 

Rhett slept all day. I kept waking him up to drink the sugarwater, his dry throat jerked and chugged. You have to drink, I said. Okay, wheezed Rhett. I twisted the cup into the sand beside us and cushioned the folded blanket under his sweaty head and covered him. Are you cold? I said. But Rhett was already asleep.

 

I tried to stay awake all night but I could not. I woke endlessly and sat and slapped myself or rose to put wood on the fire. I held Rhett and bent to hear the labored suck of air. My hand on his thin and laddered ribs. I walked out on the beach to the edge of the light and stood with clenched fists on top my skull and fell to my knees sobbing in rage.

 

It rained briefly in the night, a light patter on the tarp. I pulled it over us both and turned and lay holding my man, watching the blue flames through the plastic. I fell into a dreamless sleep.

 

When I woke again I hardly knew where I was. The fire had died, the rain had stopped. I threw back the tarp and pushed myself up on my elbows. Gray daylight. Rhett was watching me. Link, he said.

Yes. I’m right here.

Can I have a drink of water?

Yes. Yes, of course you can. How are you feeling?

I feel kind of weird.

Are you hungry?

I’m just really thirsty.

Let me get the water.

I pushed back the blanket and rose and walked out past the dead fire and got the cup and filled it out of the plastic water jug and came back and knelt and held the cup for him. You’re going to be okay, I said. Rhett drank. He nodded and looked at me. Then he drank the rest of the water. More, he said.

 

 

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for continuing to travel with these two boys.

 

I built a fire and propped Rhett’s wet clothes up and brought him a can of apple juice. Do you remember anything? I said.

About what?

About being sick?

I remember you.

Do you remember getting stuff from the boat?

He sat sipping the juice. He looked up. I’m not a dumb ass, he said. 

I know.

I had some weird dreams.

What about?

I don’t want to tell you.

That’s okay. I want you to brush your teeth.

With real toothpaste.

Yes.

Okay.

 

I inspected all the food tins but I could find nothing suspect. I threw out a few that looked pretty rusted. We sat that evening by the fire and Rhett drank hot soup and I turned his steaming clothes on the sticks and sat watching him until Rhett became embarrassed. Stop watching me, Link, he said.

Okay. 

But I didn’t.

 

In two day’s time we were walking the beach as far as the headlands and back, trudging along in our plastic bootees. We ate huge meals and I put up a sailcloth leanto with ropes and poles against the wind. We pruned down our stores to a manageable load for the cart and I thought we might leave in two more days. Then, coming back to camp late in the day I saw boot prints in the sand. I stopped and stood looking down the beach. Oh Christ, I said. Oh Christ.

What is it?

I pulled the pistol from my belt. Come on I said. Hurry.

 

The tarp was gone. Our blankets. The water bottle and our campsite store of food. The sailcloth was blown up into the dunes. Our shoes were gone. I ran up through the swale of seaoats where I had left the cart but the cart was gone. Everything. You stupid ass, I said. You stupid ass.

Rhett was standing there wide-eyed. What happened?

They took everything. Come on.

Rhett looked up,  I was almost beginning to cry.

Stay with me, I said. Stay right with me.

 

I could see the tracks of the cart where they sloughed up through the loose sand. Boot prints. How many? I lost the track on the better ground beyond he bracken and then picked up again. When we got to the road I stopped Rhett with my hand. The road was exposed to the wind from the sea and it was blown free of ash save for patched here and there. Don’t step in the road, I said. We need to get all the sand off of our feet. Here. Sit down.

 

I untied the wrappings and shook them out and tied them back again. I want you to help, I said. We’re looking for sand. Sand in the road. Even just a little bit. To see which way they went. Okay?

Okay.

 

We set off down the tarmac in opposite directions. I had not gone far before Rhett called out. Here it is, Link. They went this way. When I got there Rhett was crouched in the road. Right here, he said. It was a half teaspoon of beachsand tilted from somewhere in the underbelly of the grocery cart. I stood and looked out down the road.

Good work, I said. Let’s go.

 

We set off at a jogtrot. A pace I thought we’d be able to keep up but we couldn’t. We had to stop, Rhett leaned over and coughed. He looked at me, wheezing. We’ll have to walk, Rhett said. If they hear us they’ll hide by the side of the road. Come on.

How many do you think there are, Rhett?

I don’t know. Maybe just one.

You think we’ll have to kill them?

I don’t know.

 

We went on. It was already late in the day and it was another hour and deep into the long dusk before we overtook the thief, bent over the loaded cart, trundling down the road before us. When he looked back and saw us he tried to run with the cart but it was useless and finally he stopped and stood behind the cart holding a butcher knife. When he saw the pistol he stepped back but he didn’t drop the knife.

Get away from the cart, I said.

He looked at me. He looked at Rhett. He was an outcast from one of the communes and the fingers of his right hand had been cut away. He tried to hide it behind him. A sort of fleshy spatula. The cart was piled high. He’d taken everything.

Get away from the cart and put down the knife.

 

He looked around. As though there might be help somewhere. Scrawny, sullen, bearded, filthy. His old plastic coat held together with duct tape. The pistol was taken from my hands and Rhett cocked it. Two loud clicks. Otherwise only our breathing in the silence of the salt moorland. We could smell his stinking rags. If you don’t put down the knife and get away from the cart, Rhett said, I’m going to blow your brains out. The thief looked at me and what he saw was very sobering to him. He laid the knife on top of the blankets and backed away and stood.

Back. More.

He stepped back again.

Rhett? I said.

Be quiet.

Rhett kept his eyes on the thief. Goddamn you, he said.

Rhett, please don’t kill him.

The thief’s eyes swung wildly.

I couldn’t hold it in. I began to cry.

Come on, man. I done what you said. Listen to your friend. 

Take your clothes off.

What?

Take them off. Every goddamned stitch.

Come on. Don’t do this.

I’ll kill you where you stand.

Don’t do this, man.

I won’t tell you again.

All right. All right. Just take it easy.

He stripped slowly and piled his vile rags in the road.

The shoes.

Come on, man.

The shoes.

The thief looked at me. I had turned away and put my hands over my ears.

Okay, he said.

He sat naked in the road and began to unlace the rotting pieces of leather laced to his feet. Then he stood up, holding them in one hand. 

Put them in the cart.

He stepped forward and placed the shoes on top of the blankets and stepped back. Standing there raw and naked, filthy, starving. Covering himself with his hand. He was already shivering.

Put the clothes in.

He bent and scooped up the rags in his arms and piled them on top of the shoes. He stood there holding himself. Don’t do this, man.

You didn’t mind doing this to us.

I’m begging you.

Rhett, I said.

Come on. Listen to your man.

You tried to kill us.

I’m starving, man. I’ll die.

I’m going to leave you the way you left us.

Come on. I’m begging you.

 

Rhett pulled the cart back and swung it around and put the pistol on top and looked at me.

Let’s go, he said. And we set out along the road south, with me crying and looking back at the nude and slatlike creature standing there in the road shivering and hugging himself. Oh, Rhett, I sobbed.

Stop it.

I can’t stop it.

What do you think would have happened to us if we hadn’t caught him? Just stop it.

I’m trying.

 

When we got to the curve in the road the man was still standing there. There was no place for him to go. I kept looking back and when I could no longer see him I stopped and then I just sat down in the road sobbing. Rhett pulled up and stood looking at me. He dug our shoes out of the cart and sat down and began to take the wrappings off of my feet.You have to stop crying, he said.

I can’t.

He put on our shoes and then stood and walked back up the road but he couldn’t see the thief. He came back and stood over me. He’s gone, he said. Come on.

He’s not gone, I said. I looked up, my dirty face streaked with tears. He’s not.

What do you want to do? 

Just help him, Rhett. Just help him.

Rhett looked back up the road. 

He was just hungry, Rhett. He’s going to die.

He’s going to die anyway.

He’s so scared, Rhett.

Rhett squatted down and looked at me. I’m scared, he said. Do you understand. I’m sick and half blind and scared.  You’re not the one who has to worry about everything. 

I bowed my head and sobbed under my breath.

What? Rhett said.

I looked up, my wet and grimy face. Yes I am, I said. I am the one.

 

We wheeled the cart back up the road and stood there in the cold and the collecting dark and called but no one came.

He’s afraid to answer, Rhett.

Is this where we stopped?

I don’t know. I think so.

We went up the road calling out in the empty dark, our voices lost over the darkening shorelands. We stopped and stood with our hands cupped to our mouths, hollering mindlessly into the waste. Finally we piled the man’s shoes and clothes in the road. I put a rock on top of them.

We have to go, Rhett said. We have to go.

 

We made dry camp with no fire. I sorted out cans for supper and warmed them over the gas burner and we ate and I said nothing. Rhett tried to see his face in the blue light from the burner. I wasn’t going to kill him, he said. But I didn’t answer. We rolled ourselves in the blankets and lay there embracing quiet in the dark. I thought I could hear the sea but perhaps it was just the wind. I could tell by his breathing that Rhett was awake and after a while Rhett said: But we did kill him.

 

In the morning we ate and set out. The cart was so loaded it was hard to push and one of the wheels was cracking. The road bent its way along the coast, dead sheaves of saltgrass overhanging the pavement. The leadcoloured sea shifting in the distance. The silence. I woke that night with dull light of the crossing moon beyond the gloom making the shapes of trees almost visible and Rhett turned away coughing. Smell of rain out there. I was awake.

You have to talk to me, Rhett said.

I’m trying.

I’m sorry I woke you.

It’s okay.

Rhett got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. The distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age were they? Rhett stumbled out into the road and stood. The silence. The first morning, the salitter drying from the earth. The mud stained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with a his small pen knife to scribe these things in ink or lampblack? At some reckonable and enabled moment? He is coming to steal Rhett’s eyes. To seal his mouth with dirt.

 

I went through the cans again one by one, held them in my hand and squeezed them like a man checking for ripeness at a fruit stand. I sorted out two I thought questionable and packed away the rest and packed the cart and we sat out upon the road again. In three days we came to a small port town and we hid the cart in a garage behind a house and piled old boxes over it and then sat in the house to see if anyone would come. No one did. I looked through cabinets but there was nothing there. I needed vitamin D for Rhett. I stood at the sink and looked out down the driveway. Light the colour of bath water coagulated in the dirty panes of glass. Rhett sat slumped at the table with his head in his arms.

 

We walked through the town and down to the docks. We saw no one. I had the pistol in the pocket of my coat and I carried the flare gun in my hand. We walked out on the pier, the rough boards dark with tar and fastened down with spikes to the timbers underneath. Wooden bollards. Faint smell of salt and creosote came off the bay. On the far shore a row of warehouses and the shape of a tanker red with rust. A tall gantry crane against the sullen sky. There’s no one here, said Rhett. I didn’t answer.

 

We wheeled the cart through the streets and over the railroad tracks and came into the main road again at the fat edge of town. As we passed the last of the small wooden buildings something whistled past my head and clattered and broke up against the wall of the block building on the other side. I grabbed Rhett and fell on top of him and grabbed the cart to pull it to us. It tipped and fell over spilling the tarp and blankets into the street. In an upper floor window of the house I could see a man draw a bow on us and I pushed Rhett’s head down and tried to cover him with my body. I heard a dull thwang of the bowstring and Rhett jolted hard. Oh you bastard, he yelped. You bastard. He clawed the blankets to one side and launched and grabbed the flare gun and raised up and cocked it and rested his arm on the side of the cart. I was clinging to him. When the man stepped back into the frame of the window to draw the bow again he fired. The flare went rocketing up toward the window in a long white arc and then they could hear the man screaming. I grabbed Rhett and pushed him down and dragged the blankets over the top of him. Don’t move, I said. Don’t move and don’t look. I pulled the blankets out into the street looking for the case for the flare pistol. It finally slid out of the cart and I snatched it up and opened it and took out the shells and reloaded the pistol and breached it shut and put the rest of the loads in my pocket. I’ll be back, I said. Hold on. I patted Rhett’s squirming form through the blankets with a shaking hand and rose and ran across the street.

 

I entered the house through the backdoor with the flare-gun leveled at my waist. The house was stripped out to the wall studs. I stepped through the living room and stood at the stair landing. I listened for movement in the upper rooms. I looked out the front window to where the cart lay in the street and then I went upstairs.

 

A woman was sitting in the corner holding the man. She had taken off her coat to cover him. As soon as she saw me she began to curse me. The flare had burned out in the floor leaving a patch of white ash and there was a faint smell of burnt wood in the room. I crossed the room and looked out the window. The woman’s eyes followed me. Scrawny, lank gray hair. Who else is up here?

She didn’t answer. I stepped past her and went through the rooms. I went back into the front room. Where’s the bow? I said.

I don’t have it.

Where is it?

I don’t know.

They left you here, didn’t they?

I left myself here.

I turned and went down the stairs and opened the front door and went out into the street backward watching the house. When I got to the cart I pulled upright and piled our things back in. It’s okay, I whispered, stay close, you’re gonna be okay.

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I haven't posted in a while. Depression. Enjoy.

 

 

We put up in a store building at the end of the town. I wheeled the cart thought and into a room at the rear and shut the door and pushed the cart against it sideways. I dug out the burner and the tank of gas and lit the burner and set it on the floor and then unbuckled Rhett’s belt and took off his bloodstained pants. Rhett watched as silent as he could manage. The arrow had cut a gash just above his knee about five inches long. It was still bleeding and his while upper leg was discolored and he could see the cut was deep. Some homemade broadhead beaten out of strap iron, an old spoon, God knows what. Rhett looked at me. See if you can find the first-aid kit, he said.

I didn’t move, frightened of what this could mean.

Get the first-aid kit, damn it. Don’t just sit there.

I jumped and went to the door and began digging under the tarp and the blankets piled in the cart. I came back with the kit and gave it to Rhett and he took it without comment and set it on the concrete floor in front of him and unsnapped the catches and opened it. He reached and turned up the burner for the light. Bring me the water bottle, he said. I brought the bottle and Rhett unscrewed the lid and poured water over the wound and held it shut between his fingers while he wiped away the blood. He swabbed the wound with disinfectant and opened the plastic envelope with his teeth and took out a small hooked suture needle and a coil of silk thread and sat holding the silk to the light while the threaded it through the needle’s eye. He took a clamp from the kit and caught the needle in the jaws and locked them and set about clumsily suturing the wound. He worked quickly and took no great pains about it. I was crouching on the floor. Rhett looked at me and bent to the sutures again. You don’t have to watch, he said.

Will it be okay?

Yeah. It’s okay.

Hurts real bad?

Yes. It hurts.

He ran the knot down the thread and pulled it taut and cut off the silk with scissors from the kit and looked at me. I was looking at what he had done.

I’m sorry I yelled at you.

That’s okay, Rhett.

Let’s start over.

Okay.

 

We spent the day there, sat among the boxes and crates. You have to talk to me, Rhett said.

I’m talking.

Are you sure?

I’m talking now.

Do you want me to tell you a story?

No.

Why not?

I looked at him and looked away.

Why not?

Those stories are not true.

They don’t have to be true. They’re stories.

Yes. But in the stories we’re always helping people and we don’t help people.

Why don’t you tell me a story?

I don’t want to.

Okay.

I don’t have any stories to tell.

You could tell me a story about yourself.

You already know all the stories about me. You were where.

You have stories inside that I don’t know about.

You mean like dreams?

Like dreams. Or just things that you think about.

Yeah, but stories are supposed to be happy.

They don’t have to be.

You always tell happy stories.

You don’t have any happy ones?

They’re more like real life.

But my stories are not.

Your stories are not. No.

Rhett watched me. Real life is pretty bad?

What do you think?

Well, I think we’re still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we’re still here.

Yeah.

You don’t think that’s so great.

It’s okay.

 

We pulled a worktable up to the windows and spread out our blankets and I was lying there on my stomach looking out across the bay. Rhett sat with his leg stretched out. On the blanket between us were the two pistols and the box of flares. After a while Rhett said: I think it’s pretty good. It’s a pretty good story. It counts for something.

It’s okay, Rhett. I just want to have a little quiet time.

What about dreams? You used to tell me dreams sometimes.

I don’t want to talk about anything.

Okay.

I don’t have good dreams anyway. They’re always about something bad happening. 

You said that was okay because good dreams are not a good sign.

Maybe. I don’t know. When you wake up coughing you walk out along the road somewhere but I can still hear you coughing.

I’m sorry.

One time I heard you crying.

I know.

So if I shouldn’t cry you shouldn’t cry either.

Okay. 

Is your leg going to get better?

Yes.

You’re not just saying that.

No.

Because it looks really bad.

It’s not that bad.

That man was trying to kill us.

I thought you didn’t want to talk.

I don’t.

 

We left two days later, Rhett limped along behind the cart and I kept close to his side until we cleared the outskirts of the town. The road ran along the flat gray coast and there were drifts of sand in the road that the winds had left there. We walked out down the beach and sat in the lee of the dunes and studied the map. We had brought the burner with us and we heated water and made tea and sat wrapped in our blankets against the wind. I huddled close to his body and kissed all the skin I could find on him that was not bruised or scorched by the wind. Downshore the weathered timbers of an ancient ship. The following day we passed through the boarded ruins of a seaside resort and took the road inland through the pine wood, the long straight tarmac drifted in pineneedles, the wind in the dark trees.

Rhett sat in the road at noon in the best light there would be and snipped the sutures with the scissors and put the scissors back in the kit and took out the clamp. Then he set about pulling the small black threads from his skin, pressing down with the flat of his thumb. I sat in the road watching. Still after all that I had witnessed, blood made my headspin and my stomach turn. Rhett fastened the clamp over the ends of the threads and pulled them out one by one. Small pin-lets of blood. When he was done he put away the clamp and then taped gauze over the wound and then stood and pulled his pants up and handed the kit to me to put away.

That hurt bad, didn’t it?

Yes. It did.

Do you consider yourself brave, Rhett?

Just medium.

What’s the bravest thing you ever did?

Rhett spat into the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.

Really?

No. Don’t listen to me. Come on, let’s go.

 


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all. Thank you for reading this far. Writing this out has very much helped me deal with some things and I hope you can forgive me for putting these two men into this world.

We went on. In the nights sometimes Rhett would wake in the black and freezing waste and tell me he’d dreamt of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun. 

Rhett leaned his forehead on his arms crossed upon the bar handle of the cart and coughed. He spat bloody drool. More and more we had to stop and rest. I watched him. In some other world, I would have begun to vacate him from my life. But I had no other life. Rhett knew I lay awake in the night and listened to hear if he were still breathing.

Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel. The nights dead still and deader black. So cold. We hardly talked at all. Rhett coughed all the time and I watched him spitting blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless. He’d stop and lean on the cart and I would go on and then stop and look back and Rhett would raise his weeping eyes and see me standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in the waste like a beacon.

In two days time we came to the broad tidal river where the bridge lay collapsed in the slow moving water. We sat on the broken abutment of the road and watched the river backing upon itself and coiling over the iron trellis. I looked across the water to the country beyond.

What am I going to do, Rhett? I said. What am I going to do?

We trudged up the beach with our baggage looking for shelter but found none. I scuffed together a pile of bone-coloured wood that lay along the shore and got a fire going and we sat in the dunes with the tarp over us and watched the cold rain come in from the north. It fell harder, dimpling the sand. The fire steamed and the smoke swung in slow coils and I curled up toward Rhett under the pattering tarp and soon I was asleep.

The next day we headed inland. A vast low swath of ferns and hydrangeas and wild orchids lived on in ashen fossils which the wind had not yet reached. Our progress was a torture. In two days when we came out upon a road Rhett set the bag down and sat bent over with his arms crossed at his chest and coughed till he could cough no more. Two more days and we may have traveled ten miles. Downcountry a storm had passed over the isthmus and leveled the dead black trees from east to west like weeds in the floor of a stream. Here we camped and when Rhett lay down I knew he would not get up again. He would die. I sat watching him, my eyes welling. Oh, Rhett. I said.

He watched me come through the grass and kneel with a cup of water I’d fetched. He took the cup and drank and lay back. We had for food a single tin of peaches but he made me eat it and would not take any. I can’t, he said. It’s all right.  
I’ll save you’re half.  
Okay. You save it until tomorrow.  
I wanted to make a tent out of tarp but Rhett wouldn’t let me. He said he didn’t want anything covering him. He lay watching me at the fire. He wanted to be able to see.

I thought I smelled wet ash on the wind. I went up the road and came dragging back a piece of plywood from the roadside trash and I drove sticks into the ground with a rock and made from the plywood a rickety leanto but in the end it didn’t rain. I left the flare pistol and took the revolver with me and scoured the countryside for anything to eat but came back empty handed. Rhett took my hand, wheezing. You need to go on, he said. I can’t go with you. You need to keep going. You don’t know what might be down the road. We were always lucky. You’ll be lucky again. You’ll see. Just go. It’s all right.  
I can’t.  
It’s all right. This has been a long time coming. Now it’s here. Keep going south. Do everything the way we did it.  
You’re going to be okay, Rhett.   
No I’m not. Keep the gun with you at all times. You need to find the good guys but you can’t take any chances. No chances. Do you hear?  
I want to be with you.  
You can’t.  
Please.  
You can’t. You have to be one of the good guys.  
I don’t know how to.  
Yes you do.  
Are they real?  
Yes, they are.  
Where are they? I don’t know where they are, how to be one.  
Yes you do. Inside you. It was always there. I can see it.  
Just take me with you. Please.  
I can’t.  
Please, Rhett.  
I can’t. I can’t hold you dead in my arms. I thought I could but I can’t.  
You said you wouldn’t ever leave me.  
I know. I'm sorry. You're the best guy. You always were. If I'm not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I'll talk to you. You'll see.   
Will I hear you?   
Yes. You will. You'll hear me. Just don’t give up. Okay?  
Okay. I’m really scared, Rhett.  
I know. I’ve got to stop talking. I’m going to start coughing again.  
It’s okay, Rhett. You don’t have to talk. It’s okay.

I went down the road as far as I dared and then came back. Rhett was asleep. I sat with him under the plywood and watched him. I closed my eyes and talked to him and I kept my eyes closed and listened. 

Do you remember that woman, Rhett?  
Yes. I remember her.  
Do you think that she’s all right?  
Yes. I think she’s all right.  
Do you think she was lost?  
No. I don’t think she was lost.

I slept close to my man that night and held him but when I woke in the morning he was cold. I sat there a long time weeping and then got up and walked out through the woods to the road. When I came back I knelt beside him and held his cold hand and said his name over and over again.

I stayed three days and then I walked out to the road and I looked down it and I looked back the way we had come. Someone was coming. I started to turn and go back into the woods but I didn’t. I just stood in the road and waited, the pistol in my hand. I’d piled all the blankets on Rhett and I was cold and I was hungry. The man that hove into view and stood there looking at me was dressed in a gray and yellow ski parka, hood raised. He carried a shotgun upside down over his shoulder on a braided leather lanyard and he wore a nylon bandolier filled with shells for the gun. A veteran of old skirmishes, bearded, scarred across his cheek and the bone stoven and the one eye wandering. When he spoke his mouth worked imperfectly, and when he smiled.

Where's the man you were with?   
He died.   
Was that your brother?   
Yes. He was my brother.   
I'm sorry.   
I don’t know what to do.   
I think you should come with me.   
Are you one of the good guys?   
The man pulled back the hood from his face. His hair was long and matted. He looked at the sky. As if there were anything there to be seen. He looked at me. Yeah, he said. I’m one of the good guys. Why don’t you put the pistol away?  
I'm not supposed to let anyone take the pistol. No matter what.   
I don’t want your pistol. I just don’t want you pointing it at me.   
Okay.   
Where's your stuff?   
We don’t have much stuff.   
Have you got a sleeping bag?   
No.   
What have you got? Some blankets?   
My brother's wrapped in them.   
Show me.  
I didn’t move. The man watched me. He squatted on one knee and swung the shotgun up from under his arm and stood it in the road and leaned on the fore-stock. The shotgun shells in the loops of the bandolier were hand-loaded and the ends sealed with candle wax. He smelled of wood-smoke. Look, he said. You got two choices here. There was some discussion about weather to even come after you at all. You can stay here with your brother and die or you can go with me. If you stay you need to keep out of the road. I don’t know how you made it this far. But you should go with me. You’ll be alright.  
How do I know you're one of the good guys?   
You don’t. You'll have to take a shot.   
One of the good guys.  
You're kind of freaked out, aren't you?   
No.   
Just a little.   
Yeah.   
That's okay.   
So are you?   
What, a good guy? Yes. Yeah. We are.  
Do you have any kids?   
We do.   
Do you have a wife?   
Yeah, I have a wife. We have a little boy and we have a little girl.  
And you didn’t eat them.  
No.   
You don’t eat people.   
No. We don’t eat people.   
And I can go with you?  
Yes. You can.   
Okay then.   
Okay.

We went into the woods and the man squatted and looked at the gray wasted figure under the tilted sheet of plywood. Are these all the blankets you have?  
Yes.  
He stood. He looked at me.   
Why don’t you go back out to the road and wait for me. I'll bring the blankets and everything.   
What about Rhett?   
What about him.   
We can’t just leave him here.   
Yes we can.   
I don’t want people to see him.   
There's no one to see him.   
Can I cover him with leaves?   
The wind will blow them away.  
Could we cover him with one of the blankets?   
Yes. I'll do it. Go on now.   
Okay. 

I waited in the road and when the man came out of the woods he was carrying the blankets over his shoulder. He sorted through them and handed one to me. Here, he said. Wrap this around you. You’re cold.  
I held the pistol close to my chest.  
Do you know how to shoot it?  
Yes.  
Okay.  
What about my brother?  
There’s nothing else to be done.  
I think I want to say goodbye to him.  
Will you be alright?  
Yes.   
Go ahead, I’ll wait for you.  
I walked back into the woods and knelt beside Rhett. He was wrapped in a blanket as the man had promised and I didn’t uncover him but I sat beside him and I was crying and I couldn’t stop. I cried for a long time. I’ll talk to you every day, I whispered. And I won’t forget. No matter what. Then I rose and turned and walked back out to the road.

The woman when she saw me put her arms around me and held me. The family had a dog. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you again. She would talk to me sometimes about God. I tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to Rhett and he did talk to me and I didn’t forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber currents where the white edges of their fins rippled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be putback. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed with life.


End file.
